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Hope For Those With Body Dysmorphic Disorder

The Science Daily article entitled Body dysmorphic disorder patients who loathe appearance often get better, but it could take years discusses the disorder as highlighted in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD).  

The JNMD article reports the results of the longest-term study so far to track people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). The study was conducted by researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital. The good news? The researchers “found high rates of recovery, although recovery can take more than five years.”

This is a small study with only 15 BDD patients who were followed over an eight-year span. An excerpt:

After statistical adjustments, the recovery rate for sufferers in the study over eight years was 76 percent and the recurrence rate was 14 percent. While a few sufferers recovered within two years, only about half had recovered after five years.

The subjects were a small group diagnosed with the disorder out of hundreds of people participating in the Harvard/Brown Anxiety Research Project (HARP). Study co-author Martin Keller, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and principal investigator of the HARP research program which has been ongoing for more than 20 years, said that because the BDD sufferers were identified through this broader anxiety study, rather than being recruited specifically because they had been diagnosed with BDD, they generally had more subtle cases of the disorder than people in other BDD studies. In comparing the HARP study with the prior longitudinal study of BDD, it is possible that the high recovery rate in the HARP study is due to participants having less severe BDD on average.

 About body dysmorphic disorder:

— In its simplest definition, it is an obsessive preoccupation with a slight, imperceptible, or actually nonexistent anatomic irregularity to the degree that it interferes with normal adjustment within society. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*

Addicted To Indoor Tanning?

According to the Archives of Dermatology, there are people who are addicted to indoor tanning. That journal reported on a study of 421 university students in the northeastern United States. Using self-reported questionnaires, they screened for alcoholism and substance use as well as anxiety and depression. They also had a questionnaire about addiction to indoor tanning.

If you’re scratching your head (as I was), there’s a medically-accepted criteria known as CAGE (cut down, annoyed, guilty, eye-opener) that correlates with addiction, so they used this for “addiction” to indoor tanning also. They found that more of the kids who met the criteria for addiction to indoor tanning also had greater anxiety, greater use of alcohol, marijuana and other substances. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*

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