BIOGRAPHY ANOREXIA

Biography Anorexia



Biography Anorexia

Introduction

Anorexia nervosa is a multifaceted condition of emotional, physical, and behavioral changes associated with an individual's reluctance to maintain a minimally normal body weight (body weight below 15% of what is expected for current age and height); it affects roughly 0.1 % of the adult population of the United States. Typically, the individual displays an extreme fear of weight gain and exhibits a distorted perception of his or her size and body shape. Significant weight loss is generally achieved by eating fewer calories than is needed to sustain the body's metabolic requirement. Although anorexia nervosa is primarily diagnosed in adolescent females (accounting for approximately 90% of diagnosed population) around the time of pubertal change, the number of identified males with the disorder is increasing. Males, unlike females, face the stigma of having a gender-inconsistent disorder. Therefore, males may be predisposed to being underdiagnosed (Gordon, 2000).

There are two categories of anorexia nervosa: (1) restrictive and (2) binge-eating or purging type. The restrictive anorexic abstains from habitual characteristics of binge-eating or purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting or the misuse of enemas, diuretics, or laxatives. The binge-eating or purging anorexic has habitual characteristics of binge-eating or purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting or the misuse of enemas, diuretics, or laxatives associated with long periods of starvation. Distinct from bulimia nervosa, an individual personifying the binge-eating or purging anorexic type is characterized as significantly underweight.

Discussion and Analysis

A psychiatric disorder in which a dramatic reduction in caloric intake consequent to excessive dieting leads to significant bodily, physiological, biochemical, emotional, psychological, and behavioral disturbances. Anorexia nervosa is typically an illness of adolescent females: 90% of all cases begin in girls who are between 12 and 20 years of age. Nevertheless, this disorder can also occur in males, in prepubertal girls, and in women well into their third decade. Moreover, if the illness becomes chronic, it can persist into mid-life and beyond. Anorexia nervosa literally means “nervous loss of appetite” but appears to have little to do with such. Rather, there is usually a conscious decision made by a teen-age girl, most commonly around the ages of 14 or 18 years, to embark upon a diet.

Although anorexia nervosa is classified today as a psychiatric disorder and distinguished from other eating disorders, diagnostic criteria are currently under revision and appropriate treatments are contested among clinicians in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Diagnostic criteria currently recognized by both International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) classifications are as follows: body weight at least 15 percent below the minimum normal level, body image distortion, and, among women, amenorrhea. ICD criteria specify that weight loss is self-induced by means of dietary restriction, supplemented either by the use of self-induced purging or by excessive exercising. DSM criteria specify an intense fear of gaining weight or of obesity and distinguish types of anorexia—“binging/ purging” or “restrictive”—according to whether or not binge eating and self-induced purging are features ...