Psychological Comorbidity of Eating Disorders
Psychological comorbidity of eating disorders may be organized most conveniently according to psychiatric diagnoses of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–IV (DSM-IV) and assessments of specific traits. In this chapter, further categorization of the DSM-IV diagnoses is made according to Axis I and Axis II diagnoses (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994). The most comprehensive psychological comorbidity study is from the U.S. national comorbidity survey replication (Hudson et al., 2008). In this study, at least one lifetime comorbid psychiatric DSM-IV disorder was present in 56.2% of anorexia nervosa participants, 94.5% of those with bulimia nervosa, 78.9% of those with binge eating disorder, 63.6% with subthreshold binge eating disorder, and 76.5% with any binge eating. Similar results were obtained with other population based studies and also from studies of clinical populations containing the diagnoses of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder (Braun, Sunday, & Halmi, 1994; Godart et al., 2002; Halmi et al., 1991; Hudson et al., 1987; Johnson et al., 2001; Kaye et al., 2004; McElroy et al., 2005).