Photo Credit: Andrii Zorii

New research was presented at AES 2023, the annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society, held December 1-5. This is the third of 5 studies presented during the conference that PW has selected to highlight.

Eating disorders have been associated with chronic medical conditions in previous research, but the link between such disorders and epilepsy has yet to be assessed. To examine this, Itay Tokatly Latzer, MD, and colleagues compared intellectually intact adolescents with epilepsy and comorbid eating disorders (n=146) with two age-matched control groups of intellectually intact adolescents with epilepsy and no eating disorder (n=146) and those with only an eating disorder (n=146). The rate of eating disorders in adolescents with epilepsy was 8.4% overall, 13.1% in girls, and 3.5% in boys. The researchers reported a significant increase in the annual number of adolescents with epilepsy who had comorbid eating disorders between 2013 and 2022 (P<0.001). Risk factors for eating disorders included psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (P<0.001) and lower zBMI percentiles (P<0.001). The study team identified three distinct eating disorder patterns associated with different seizure types: non-provoked seizures (epilepsy) preceded anorexia nervosa-restrictive type (P=0.01), provoked seizures followed atypical anorexia (P=0.01), and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures preceded bulimia nervosa (P=0.001). “Adolescents with epilepsy may feel a loss of control because they don’t know when they’ll have a seizure,” Dr. Tokatly Latzer said in a press release. “Controlling what they eat or don’t eat can presumably make them feel they have regained some control.”