School affects girls’ chances of being diagnosed with an eating disorder

The school a girl attends can affect her chance of being diagnosed with an eating disorder, finds a new study co-authored by UCL researchers. The results are published in the International Journal of Epidemiology . Researchers from Oxford University, UCL, the University of Bristol, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm used routinely collected data from Sweden to take account of individual factors that would make someone more likely to develop an eating disorder. Even after accounting for these factors, there were still differences in the rates of eating disorder according to the school attended. Girls attending schools with higher proportions of female students, and high proportions of universityeducated parents were more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder than girls at schools with lower proportions of female students and fewer university-educated parents. "Our study suggests that eating disorders are more common in some schools than others," said Professor Glyn Lewis (UCL Psychiatry). "We cannot be sure why this happens, but the worst affected schools had a higher proportion of girls and more highly educated mothers.