The Youngest Victims of Anorexia

Doctors around the country have seen an increasing number of young victims of anorexia-some as young as 8 years old. While this may represent increased parental awareness of eating disorders, it also reinforces current research that suggests a strong genetic component to the development of an eating disorder rather than simply environmental pressures.

Most researchers now believe that eating disorders are the result of a complex combination of genes, brain chemistry, and environmental factors. Eating disorder in an older teen may be triggered by cultural pressure to be perfect and a desire to have control over one aspect of life, but anorexia in a very young child is less likely to be a result of such cultural pressure.

And anorexia in a young child is more dangerous than in an older teen or adult. Young children's bodies are growing and developing at a fast rate. Heart and bone growth as well as brain growth and development is affected very quickly when calories are severely restricted.

Young children don't respond the same way to treatment as older teens, either. Long hospital or treatment stays can be excessively traumatic, and these children may be too young for talk therapy to be effective. It's thought that young children benefit most when anorexia is treated as a life-threatening disease, such as cancer; the medicine used for treatment is food. Many successful eating disorder programs involve parents in monitoring food intake until the child can make healthy choices for herself.

What Happens When Children with Eating Disorders Grow into Teens with Eating Disorders

It's 8:00p.m., do you know where your children are-or who they are talking to? These days, you may not. Today's teens are far more technology savvy than most parents are, and they use technology such as computers and cell phones to obtain information and maintain a constant and varied social network of friends. Added to the changing structure of today's families, kids depend more upon peers for information and support than ever before. Many relatively innocuous teen trends, such as day-glo hair, body piercing and alternative music-arise from and are supported by kids' communication with other kids. But not all of the information and support that kids get from their peers is positive. Many websites that offer teens a sense of belonging and community promote dangerous behaviors.