On the Relationship Between Body Perception and Eating Disorders in Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

AbstractEating disorders are severe mental disorders with serious medical complications and poor long-term outcome, which typically develop during adolescence. Subclinical symptoms, such as body dissatisfaction, dieting, and binge eating, are common among adolescents, also in Luxembourg. Body perception, including how the body looks (visual perception) and how it feels (interoception), is altered on multiple levels in eating disorders. We construe interoception as a multilevel process, where signals are transmitted from the periphery to the central nervous system for further processing and initiation of physiological and behavioural responses to maintain homeostatic balance. Examples from research on young women in Luxembourg include delayed responses to satiation and abnormal gastric motility in people who binge eat, and increased cortical processing of heartbeats in patients with anorexia nervosa. Understanding the complexity of alterations in visual and interoceptive body perception, as well as their interactions with the bio-psycho-social changes associated with adolescence, is essential for the selection and further development of adequate intervention and prevention programmes. Modern approaches based on biofeedback and virtual reality may be particularly appealing to adolescents, and are currently being investigated in Luxembourg.