Study highlights burden of eating disorders in South London

A new study from UCL and King's College London has revealed that 7.5 per cent of adults in a South London sample could be diagnosed as having an eating disorder. The clinical criteria surrounding eating disorders recently changed with the introduction of the fifth and latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals across the world. This new research, published today in Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, is one of the first to use the new criteria in a study of eating disorder prevalence in the general population in England. A total of 1,698 people aged 16-90 were initially screened for eating disorders through the South East London Community Health Study (SELCoH). 145 of these people were followed up to investigate how common eating disorders were and how often they occurred alongside one or more additional mental health disorder (i.e. their 'comorbidity'). Proportional weighting was used to estimate prevalence across the whole sample.