Department of Head and Skin, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Ghent Experimental Psychiatry (GHEP) Lab, Ghent, Belgium.
Eur Eat Disord Rev. 2021 Jan;29(1):86-100. doi: 10.1002/erv.2805. Epub 2020 Nov 6.
Eating disorder (ED) symptoms and transdiagnostic vulnerability characteristics play a crucial role in the aetiology and maintenance of EDs. Over the last decade, researchers have started to model complex interrelations between symptoms using network models, but the literature is limited in that it has focused solely on symptoms and investigated-specific disorders while ignoring transdiagnostic aspects of mental health.
This study tackles these challenges by investigating network relations among core ED symptoms, comorbid clinical symptoms (depression and anxiety) and empirically supported vulnerability and protective mechanisms (personality traits, maladaptive cognitive schemata, perfectionism and resilience) in a sample of 2302 treatment-seeking ED patients. We estimated a regularized partial correlation network to obtain conditional dependence relations among all variables. We estimated node centrality (interconnectivity) and node predictability (the overall magnitude of symptom inter-relationships).
The findings indicate a central role of overvigilance, excessive focus on inhibiting emotions and feelings, interoceptive awareness and perfectionism.
These results suggest that excessive control of bodily aspects by dietary restraint (possibly through inhibition) and interoceptive awareness may be important constructs that warrant future research in understanding vulnerability in EDs. We provide all code and data via the Open Science Framework.
饮食失调（ED）症状和跨诊断脆弱性特征在 ED 的病因和维持中起着至关重要的作用。在过去的十年中，研究人员已经开始使用网络模型来模拟症状之间的复杂相互关系，但该文献的局限性在于它仅关注症状，并研究了特定障碍，而忽略了心理健康的跨诊断方面。
本研究通过调查 2302 名寻求治疗的 ED 患者样本中的核心 ED 症状、共病临床症状（抑郁和焦虑）以及经验支持的脆弱性和保护机制（人格特质、适应不良的认知图式、完美主义和适应力）之间的网络关系，解决了这些挑战。我们估计了正则化部分相关网络，以获得所有变量之间的条件依赖关系。我们估计了节点中心性（连通性）和节点可预测性（症状相互关系的整体幅度）。
研究结果表明，过度警觉、过度关注抑制情绪和感觉、内脏感知和完美主义起着核心作用。
这些结果表明，通过饮食限制（可能通过抑制）和内脏感知对身体方面的过度控制可能是理解 ED 脆弱性的重要结构，值得未来进行研究。我们通过开放科学框架提供了所有的代码和数据。
