What Are the Signs & Symptoms of Anorexia?
While shame prevents many people who suffer from anorexia nervosa from admitting they are victims of an eating disorder, common symptoms may alert friends and family members to the presence of their illness. Such symptoms are expressed through a person's thought patterns, emotional disposition and even through telltale physical signs. The ability to recognize such symptoms can allow friends and family members to implement positive intervention measures, targeted to improving the health and well-being of the victim.
Facts
Anorexia is a pervasive illness affecting approximately 5 to 10 million females in the United States alone. It is typically experienced by females during adolescence. However, roughly 1 million males in the United States suffer from this illness as well. Unfortunately, few sufferers seek treatment. Almost 90 percent of people afflicted with anorexia suffer in silence.
Mental and Emotional Symptoms
Self-destructive thought patterns typically accompany the onset of anorexia nervosa. People who have this illness develop a morbid fear of obesity. Thinness becomes a state of existence that sufferers will tirelessly pursue, regardless of the damage caused by such pursuit. Such tireless pursuit is frequently evidenced in ritualistic thought and behavior patterns, similar in character to obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Despite the fact that individuals afflicted with anorexia may strive to practice self-control, their emotional states are likely to be wildly erratic. People who are anorexic are prone to exhibit sharp mood swings. Shifts in moods may be related to dissatisfaction with results of dieting, self loathing associated with breaking a diet or even as a consequence of a chemical imbalance.
Physical Symptoms
Left untreated, an eating disorder is a crippling illnesses that gradually ravages a person's body. As a consequence of malnutrition, a subject may experience hair loss, brittle fingernails, constipation and dry, yellowish skin. Females may also fail to experience their menstrual cycles. Typically, sufferers of anorexia weigh significantly less than their ideal body weight, losing at least 15 percent of their weight due to the illness.
Significance
Anorexia is an illness that, if left untreated, has the power to kill. People who suffer from anorexia often exhibit negative or suicidal inclinations. Anorexia may precipitate a state of malnutrition that deprives individuals of minerals such as potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium, which are essential components to the proper performance of the human heart. Thus, anorexics often die from cardiac arrest.
Misconceptions
Although both anorexia and bulimia are eating disorders, in many respects these illnesses are diametrically opposed to each other. Anorexia is evidenced by a person's refusal to eat, while bulimia is evidenced by a person's desire to engage in recurrent episodes of binge eating.
Another misconception regarding anorexia is that it is an incurable illness, and people who suffer from anorexia will fast until they die. In fact, many people who suffer from anorexia do experience recovery. Few people engage in rigid bouts of fasting but rather in episodic fasting punctuated by very sparse food consumption.
Diagnosis and Treatment
Anorexia is an illness that is manifested in a person's significant weight loss, reaching or exceeding 15 percent of his or her ideal body weight. However, diagnosis of anorexia is not simply made on the basis of a person's physique. Rather, four important diagnostic criteria used by health care professionals suggest that anorexia is a mental illness. These criteria, which are contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, examine a person's unwillingness to eat as well as fears accompanying this unwillingness.
Anorexic behaviors often occur as the result of an absence of knowledge regarding risks posed by these behaviors. Consequently, treatment of anorexia concentrates on providing patients with information, both based on research and firsthand experiences shared by other patients in group therapy sessions.
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