Hormonal changes and eating disorders: Cause or effect?
MORTOGLOU A.

Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating and their variations are psychiatric disorders characterized by a disordered eating behaviour, which results in great loss or stability or great increase of body weight.

Practically, all hormonal changes observed in eating disorders go back to their normal levels after weight restoration.

Heredity plays a crucial role in the manifestation of eating disorders. In fact, research has shown that polymorphisms or gene mutation which control the orexigenic peptides and/or saturated peptides are found with an increased frequency in patients suffering from those disorders.

Until new data can be gathered, on both research and clinical level, perhaps we should accept the "technical assumption" that eating disorders manifest in persons who have a genetically disturbed substrate when the environment allows it. Then, the effects of these disorders aggravate hormonal deviation leading to the well-known ill phenotype.

Key words: Eating disorders, hormones, CNS, heredity.