Chemical in brain tied to anorexia

Women who suffer from anorexia have increased chemical activity in a part of the brain that controls reward and reinforcement, something that may explain why they are driven to lose weight but don’t get any pleasure from it, a new study has found.

Researchers used brain-imaging technology on 10 women who had recovered from anorexia and 12 healthy women. In the anorexic women, they found overactivity by dopamine receptors in a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Dopamine is a brain chemical that is associated with regulating pleasure.

“The take-home message is dopamine in this area may be very important in how we respond to stimuli, how we view positive and negative reinforcement,” said Dr. Walter Kaye, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of the researchers involved in the study.

Dr. Guido Frank, a child psychiatry fellow at the University of California at San Diego and a leader of the study, said the hope was that the research could lead to the development of drugs to treat anorexia.

“It’s very, very hard to treat. They recognize it’s wrong, but they still don’t eat,” Frank said.

The research was reported this month online in the journal Biological Psychiatry. About 1% of American women suffer from anorexia, a disease than can also affect men. It has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness, Kaye said.