Infection | Brain
Anorexia Has A Bacterial Origin, Researchers Say
It’s too naive to think anorexia arises from psychosocial factors alone, researchers argue.
Sitting as the 3rd most common disease affecting adolescent females, anorexia is characterized by severe calorie restriction — comorbid with anxiety and depression — that leads to the starvation and malfunctioning of many other organs. Anorexia is titled the most fatal mental illness.
Anorexia Etiology Revisited
“Psychological factors might be important but are unconvincing as the primary or major cause [of anorexia],” James Morris and colleagues from Lancaster University, UK, wrote in Medical Hypothesis in 2016.
Anorexia is a functional or psychosomatic disease; psycho means mind and somatic means body. It’s a mind-body disease caused by a combination of psychological and physical factors. Modern views of anorexia, however, neglect the physical cause of the disease.
As Morris and the team argued: “There might be an increased incidence of physical and sexual abuse in childhood in those who go on to manifest functional disorders. It is easy to see how this could influence symptoms in adults but it stretches credulity to imagine abuse as the…
