The study of risk factors For eating disorders it is important for four fundamental reasons: it clarifies the mechanisms that cause disorders allowing the reduction of the stigma associated with them; They are an important form of information for the revision of diagnostic criteria; The treatment is more coherent when the causes of the pathology are known; The identification of risk factors is crucial for the development of prevention programs.
Research conducted by Washington University of St. Louis recently investigated the link between sexual orientation, gender identity And Food disorders involving 223 US college university students.
The results, published on the Journal of Teenascent Healthhighlight that the use of slimming pills and the use of compensatory pipelines, self -induced vomiting and laxatives to prevent weight gain, is twice higher among young transsexuals than that recorded among heterosexual peers.
It is the first time that a study, which investigates the risk factors of eating disorders, includes a sufficient number of Transgender subjects such as to allow statistically significant comparisons.
A frequent diffusion of these disorders also emerges from the studio even among young “insecure” on their sexual orientation and among young people gay cisgenderwhose gender identity coincides, that is, with one’s biological sex.
About 1.5% of the students examined reported one diagnosis of eating disorder carried out during the previous year. Almost 3% reported having vomited, or used laxatives, and over 3% had used pills for the diet during the previous month.
The research also emerges that the Transgender students they have the same probability of heterosexual cisgender women to report a diagnosis of eating disorder or to use compensation mechanisms.
The new study reflects many of the results of previous research also conducted in Europe, as pointed out by Dr. Monica Algars of ABO Akademi University of Turku, in Finland, but it is important because it was made on a large number of participants and above all Comparing Transgender and Cisgender subjects.
In a previous study, Algars had stressed that transgender people can fight for thinness to try to suppress the characteristics of their kind of birth, or accentuate characteristics of their kind of self-identification.
All these data are undoubtedly linked to the emotional malaise of being discriminated against, but open the way to a new line of research in the context of eating disorders and above all underline the urgency to process appropriate specific interventions e Prevention projects targeted.
