Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Hope for teens with anorexia

The release last week of the long-awaited results from a five-year multi-site study confirmed what many of us already knew: family-based treatment for anorexia works. In a controlled randomized study, FBT worked better than traditional individual-based psychotherapy: More than half the patients getting FBT recovered, compared with less than a quarter of those getting the other treatment. And far fewer in the FBT cohort relapsed.

This is great news. There's more work to be done, of course; a 50 percent recovery rate is not acceptable. But it's so much better than the usual statistics: people with anorexia stay sick for five to seven years, and only about a third recover.

Read more here on my Psychology Today blog.