Bulimia treated with imipramine: a placebo-controlled, double-blind study.

Bulimia, the syndrome of compulsive binge eating, is a common and often severe disorder frequently resistant to known therapies. Recent evidence suggesting a link between bulimia and affective disorder prompted the authors to perform a double-blind study of imipramine versus placebo with 22 chronically bulimic women. Imipramine was associated with a significantly reduced frequency of binge eating and with improvement on several other measures of eating behavior. On 1- to 8-month follow-up, 18 of the 20 treated subjects (90%) had responded to imipramine or a subsequent antidepressant. This finding augments the growing evidence that bulimia may be related to affective disorder.