Dr. Janet Treasure is a researcher who specializes in eating disorders. Recently, she announced findings which link anorexia to genetic differences. She also suggested that anorexia and Asperger syndrome have intriguing similarities. In a recent interview in the Times UK, she described her work and its relationship to autism:
We have found, for example, that people with eating disorders find it difficult to change self-set rules and learnt behaviour once fixed in the brain. They also see the world in close-up detail, as if they are looking at life through a zoom lens – but this can be at the cost of having an ability to see and think about self-identity and connections with others without getting lost in the details.Of course, there is as yet no proof of any connection between eating disorders and autism. Trisha Gura, blogging in the Huffington Post, cites at least one expert on the differences between the two:We also discovered that this distorted pattern of processing information has a strong similarity to autistic spectrums. It has even been described as the female form of Asperger’s. Traits that may appear present in childhood, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or overperfectionism, can often indicate a vulnerability to developing an eating disorder later in adolescence.
But while compelling, the observable similarities do not constitute scientific proof. "Just because it looks like a duck doesn't make anorexia an Asperger's duck,"says clinical psychologist Richard Pomerance, Ph.D, who has seen a number of Asperger's patients in his private practice near Boston. He points out that there are at least as many symptoms of Asperger's -- difficulty interpreting facial expressions and other social cues, for example--that do not show up in most anorexics.It's certainly easy to misconstrue certain personality styles as "autistic." Social phobia, speech disorders, anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and other issues may look like autism to the untrained eye. So - does anorexia just LOOK like autism? Or are there real connections? The research is yet to be done - but meanwhile, what are your thoughts?
My son is only 2, not yet diagnosed Autistic, but has been considered anorexic. This eating disorder has been called Sensory Feeding Disorder too. The sensory issues seem to cause the anorexia, and has nothing to do with body image, but everything to do with what he eats or doesn’t eat.
My son, 12 years old, has Aperger’s syndrome, and just now he developed anorexia nervosa. I THINK HIS DIETING BECAME ANOREXIA BECAUSE EVERYTHING AN ASPERGER’S CHILD DO THEY DO IT VERY SERIOUSLY AND OBSSESSIVELY…
I am a 43 year old woman and I had anorexia and later on bulimia (from 12 until 31 years old).
Now,I have 3 sons and two of them (10 and 12 years old) are diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.
I recognise much of the symptoms in myself.
our 13 yr. old daughter was recently diagnosed with Asperger’s, OCD, Depression and now is binging, and potentially purging. The binging has been going on for a long time, she just got very good, and better still, at hiding/hoarding/sneaking. Recently, she was caught at school stealing food from a teacher’s personal locker. There seems to be no limits to which she will go. It is very hard to know where the Asperger’s ends and the depression, OCD and eating disorders begin/end… so far, we have been shuffled back and forth between an ER, a psychologist, an eating disorder clinic and its docs, nutritionists and psychiatrists… now, the eating disorder clinic MD is sending us to take her to an inpatient psychiatrist at the hospital because her stealing at school/binging and weigh loss is so “severe” that it is beyond the realm of “normal” eating disorder symptoms. No one knows what to do with her, or how to help us help her… the priority problem shifts depending on who we are talking to… the ER said, take her to the EDC, the EDC said take her to inpatient psychiatrist, the psychologist said see a specialist (who prescribed antidepression meds–have not helped at all with the OCD) and, many months and much anguish/fear later, we are nowhere ahead of where we were before. The impact this illness(es) is/are having is profound and affects our entire family (we have three other children who are scared of/for our daughter…) and it affects the parental relationship, as we have no idea how to deal with issues like repetitive stealing from parents (us), siblings, neighbors and now, teachers at school. No consequences have made a bit of difference, no amount of counselling and/or talking about this has changed anything. We are lost and afraid of the next thing she will do… we have been begging for help, but no one knows how to help us now… can any professional out there offer advice? We are desperate to get our daughter well…
Your daughter was 13 in 2007 and my daughter is now 15 and so much like your daughter. Mine has just been expelled from the state mental hospital for ‘bad behaviour’. She went for anorexia and wouldn’t engage with the psychologist (or any other psychologist todate).
Please update up with how your daughter is doing now and have you found anything that has helped.
Indeed I think it is linked. I had anorexia and bulimia but it had nothing at all to do with body image or fatness. I went through the nightmares of the damn in treatment because no one believed this to be the case.
I have since been dxed with aspergers’s and feel vey bad that it was not caught sooner. For everyone it is not linked. But for me it was.
I was very confused on how to feed myself based on the rules that I considered right.
I hope there is more research on this.
Incidently, I had many red flags about my autism. I banged head, rocked, had intestinal problems, social issues, and ate narrow foods. This should have been a warning to anyone.
I am positive they are linked. My AS daughter (17) has developed anorexia and it is impossible to convince her about treatment. She is so fixated in her routine and extremely little food intake. I do not know how to convince, at this time to force her would be much worse.
I’ve had eating disordered tendencies since I was maybe twelve, and they developed into anorexia and bulimia. I’ve also been diagnosed with AS and just now did a Google search on “Aspergers and eating disorders” because it seemed to me that they must be inextricably linked. Lo and behold.
By the way, I’m female. AS does exist in females…it’s not common (even my ASD-experienced therapist has never met another female with AS) but it happens.
I am a bulimic/Mia aspie and my Mia (a slang term for bulimia) has a lot to do with body image. Not so much with the fact I am fat but with the fact that I do not think I am pritty or anything. The only person that knows about this is one of my friends and the people at the pro-mia sites I go to (I do not know any of them in real life).
I have never heard of this connection before in my near quarter of a century of life on this earth. That is not to say that it is inaccurate, but there is not enough data to derive a plausible conclusion on the matter.
I am a female with Asperger’s and quite honestly, I disapprove of referring to Anorexia as the “female form of Asperger’s.” A number of those who commented on this post have in some form shown they agree with there being a link. I am here to offer a counter point as my opinion is vastly different.
A trait of Asperger’s is an affinity for facts, figures, analytical thinking, and logic. Logic is my guiding force and I have problems understanding things when there is no logical or scientific explanation for it. One of my best and closest friends suffers from an eating disorder. And ~let me tell you~, there is NOTHING, and I mean ~NOTHING~ logical about an eating disorder!!
The way her mind works (and is influenced by her E.D.) is very confusing to me. Even she has said she doesn’t always understand why her mind thinks the way it does.
In my mind, as much as I try to understand how she feels (and believe me, I try!) and how her mind comes to the ill-formed conclusions it does about her weight and appearance and whatnot (she is absolutely gorgeous! Especially now that she is recovering!), it makes NO logical sense. I can’t even begin to try to put an example on paper (or screen, as it were), it’s so convoluted the way she describes it.
In short, people with Asperger’s usually are analytical and logical. Eating Disorders are in NO way logical. If there is any link in my opinion, it would have to be a similarity over obsessing about things, whether it be calories consumed and in what ways on a daily basis or knowing the ENTIRE schedule for trains arriving and departing from Grand Central Station in New York City). There, that’s my piece.
l think the correlation may be in the strong feeling of emotion in the stomach. Anorexics are attempting to control this, l believe, more than the social situation (which might also be causing them increased distress) and food itself. ln a way this does make the disorder both rational and logical – food can heighten the turmoil in the already sensitive stomach – but to remove this “source” of discomfort does require an obsessive mind…
Both are rampant, to varying degrees in my family…
I agree with your disapproval but for different reasons. I am/have been both anorexic and bulimic for about 7 years. I would like to add that I do not have a diagnosis of aspergers but it would explain a lot of things unrelated to the eating disorder and possibly even some of the things that eventually fed into it. So maybe i have and it maybe i don’t, so i am going to focus on my knowledge of eating disorders.
First off you are correct, eating disorders themselves are not logical. That being said I know a lot of women and men that are logical AND have eating disorders, myself included. Being logical when you do illogical things increases stress which exacerbates compensatory behaviors in my experience. The thing that you should try to understand is that it is not “the way her mind works”(at least not initially) which is a common misconception. The problem is that when you starve body you are also starving your brain and so cannot think on the same level as others. In my case i knew i wasn’t being logical but it was a compulsion. Also from what my therapist has told me, once your brain has been starved, the patterns you develop can be the way you think but you can overcome it. I hope that I explained that alright, I am terrible at explanations. If something i said does not make sense please let me know and i will try to clarify(I am very used to having to do this).
The proposed link between anorexia nervosa and Asperger’s syndrome/high functioning autism makes a lot of sense to me. I have struggled with anorexia nervosa for many years and it has had little to do with desiring a ‘perfect body’. Rather, the motivation behind my anorexic behaviours have been to regulate my world and to cope with anxiety. The behaviours of my anorexia nervosa (food restriction, calorie counting ritualistic eating and ritualistic exercising) made life seem predictable and a means of introducing some conistency and regularity into a chaotic world.
I believe there is a connection between Aspies and Anorexia especially in the obsessive and perfectionistic qualities. My 15 year old son was diagnosed when he was 7 with AS. He just started this past year losing weight but he was heavy in grade school. He over ate and now he under eats but in the same fussy way. He is always in the kitchen making himself something with little or no calories. He can’t stand it if I cook for him, he paces like a caged animal constantly checking to see what I’m putting in his food.
It wouldn’t surprise me, like the others commenting, I had anorexia when i was younger and likely have AS (undiagnosed, but I’m at least the autism phenotype). My son has HFA is how I’ve come to this discovery. It seems like the anorexia is one more piece to the puzzle that’s been my life. For me, anorexia was the result of depression from not fitting in and unsuccessful suicide attempts.
My son also has feeding disorders (they’re called feeding disorders when they’re young children, eating disorders once they hit pre-puberty) and there’s apparently a link in families with eating disorders and feeding disorders. Eating disorders (in the females) and aspergers (in the males) also runs very heavily throughout my family (aunts/uncles/cousins), my cousin and son also have classic autism. I also have some schizophrenia in my family. I’m sure it’s all related.
Response to (4) ‘mom’ December 27, 2007. Your story has many similarities with mine and my 12 year old daughters. No-one seems to know what to do or want to really get involved. We just go round in the circle of hospital – eating disorder team – psychiatrist each passing on to the next as just outside of their remit. My daughter will not eat anything she considers not healthy or outside of meal times and as a result is way below weight and recently ended up in hospital for a month critically ill. And all we get is ‘you just have to make her eat more!’ I wonder if you have had any constructive help since 2007?
Yes, there is help out there and you can make your daughter eat more. I have a 15 year old daughter who is AN and recovering. I found answers, help, and support throught the FEAST website and the aroundthedinnertable.org parent’s forum. When you visit these sites you will learn about the most current research and highest rate of success with the Maudsley approach. It saved my life and my daughter’s life!
I went through anorexia myself…and in many areas, I am a spitting image of the mild side of the autistic spectrum. I MUST have routine, routine, routine and am overly sensitive to sound, smells and touches. And I cannot say that I have true friends; ‘hanging out’ is like observing people through a glass door or acting in a play.
Interestingly, I think the ‘kind’ of anorexia I experienced (and many others probably do) is one NOT related to body image but simply to over-analyzing, overthinking, and over-’optimizing’ every meal to create an order to indulge what very well may be a somewhat autistic mind. I honestly NEVER saw myself as overweight or ugly; I thought I was “normal” and simply ate (i.e. starved) the way I did because I thought I was attaining an orderly perfection of tiny portions and nutritional watchdog-ness. Losing 20 or 30 pounds completely eluded me.
I think the main difference between Asperger’s/autism and anorexia is the motivation behind the actions… With anorexia or any other eating disorder, it’s usually about control/perfection.
But with Asperger’s/autism, they’d only be avoiding foods because they don’t like them in some way, and they would gladly eat something else.
So, I just think that any similarities between the two are purely superficial….
It seems to me an Eating Disorder in people with AS is different than an Eating Disorder in people without AS. When I was in treatment I would get annoyed with the other patients always whining about calories, fat, weight, etc because I knew they weren’t going to gain weight after eating just one slice of pizza. I never cared about my weight or body image, I hated exercising, and I never counted calories or measure anything. For me my Eating Disorder held different purposes, for example, everyday I knew what I was supposed to eat and drink and that made me feel better. At times it also seemed like I had an Eating Disorder to shut everyone out or to just be defiant. There are many times that I still wonder if I really had an Eating Disorder because so many things didn’t fit with anything I have heard.
I have struggled with eating for a long time. It’s all about numbers to me. I have to add things up and balance them out. I used to be bulemic but don’t purge anymore or exercise excessively.
I still have to make math out of food. I can’t stand the feeling of water or sticky things on my hands and am very sensitive to noise and the feeling of clothing on my skin. If there is a small grain of dirt in my bedsheets, it has to be fixed. I must always line things up numerically, weather it be numbers of baskets on a shelf (they should be in odd numbers or I won’t stop rearranging them)
I have taken asperger quotient quizzes online and scored 164 where 50 and above is typical for diagnosis. I have a terrible time interpreting social cues.
Having struggled with anorexia and bulemia for a good portion of my 32 years of life (not currently… I only have to mathematically line up food proportions) I have to say that I would not doubt a strong co-relation with eating disorders and aspergers. I am seeking further assesment.
When I saw a psychologist in my teens due to my eating disorder he asked me why I engaged in the eating disordered behaviours. I told him that it created personal space for me in the midst of chaos. It truly was the root of my ED. I suspect that I have been a long undiagnosed aspie.
It’s grievous, but I’m seeking help to learn how to function better and get out of my head. That’s where I spend the entirety of my waking hours.
It seems the Aspies commenting here disagree. For good reasons, I think. There may be a connection between these things but not in this obvious way. Things are not that easy here.
All eating disorders can be simply one of the many forms of AS comorbidity, or the comorbidity of 23 other disorders or a direct response to growing up in bad conditions that hinder self-development or just a result of very normal and common motives amongst mostly adolescent, neurotypical humans.
The simple connection between all these things and the core component of everything is metabolism. “Bio-historically, the brain is just an eversion of the digestion tract” – says Udo Pollmer, controversial nutrition expert from Germany. He may be up to something there.
Both disorders apparently have a genetic component but that’s true for most other, otherwise totally unrelated diseases as well. However there’s an interesting difference in all the similarities:
You Aspie guys and gals should maybe stick to your “narrow food habits” as much as you like and not let anyone talk you into “healthy” nutrition behavior too much. Chances are that these are just the things your metabolism needs and wants most. If your eating behavior is not really “sick” and leading to problems, chances are that your metabolism is just protecting itself in an astounishing way. Aspies seem to have a tendency to eat a strangely narrow, carbohydrate based, proteine-rich and rather low fat diet with tons of stuff that support fatty acid digestion and forming of Omega-3 fatty acids as preferred material for cell construction. A nutrition based on the recommendations to prevent liver and other metabolism diseases and the “metabolic syndrome”. A nutrition that also gurantees sufficient and increased uptake of zinc, copper, iron etc. and the Vitamins needed to metabolize them, all of which we know that they keep the signal transmission to and the processing in the brain within important parameters. Aspies seem to do that without ever having read anything about nutrition – their brain seems to be better connected to their stomach than the neurologic typical person, who has the same ability but apparently lost the connection to it. Probably all kids have the innard ability to select the food that’s best for their body, but Aspies often instinctively form strange habits, which resemble a strict diet and they want to stick to it. That only looks like malnutriton to normal people, in fact it’s a quite optimized basic diet for the task of keeping your direct wiring to this world under control and your metabolism healty.
Of course the NT world tries to force its nutrition habits upon us when we grow up – especially undiagnosed – and we try to accommodate…with fatal results. We might follow this strange diet for a good reason: It creates a proper fuel to protect our over-sensible senses from self-destruction. I believe that forcing or bringing us off this plan can result in severe damage to our “food-brain”, we indeed can snap into other fixed, but bad nutrition habits and since we are not really nutrition experts, we don’t know that our nerves, increased comorbidity, our equally sensible metabolism and our future is at stake here. We are prone to not care about form or weight or other outer appearances, we just choose what feels best and keeps our mind in balance all by ourselves. And this is a major difference.
Asperger’s syndrome is a collection of ~300 typical behavioral traits, symptoms and indicators of which only a few childhood-typical are clearly not comorbid and I doubt that it is really a “disorder” at all (the story here sort of proving my point), but you can find a good share of all DSM-listed mental disorders in this collection when comorbidity has developed badly. Hence it’s a very “connective” disorder, and a confusing one but it’s certainly one that doesn’t manifest itself so obviously in “metabolic” symptoms like Anorexia Nervosa.
So it all boils down to what we knew all along: Nutrition has strong influence on neuropsychological processes and hence can help and even cause disorders. However, nutrition does not fix genes. I think it’s possible that both disorders may share the risk of a metabolism based “sensitivity” that leads into the inability to escape malnutrition patterns – what causes stress is changing the nutrition demands, and the changed nutrition causes stress (leaving very sensible circuits unprotected) and if the new nutrition habit is “starvation for more acceptance”, you even get some nice endorphine shots when you start with it, while your brain is starving too. But a metabolic link between diseases exists between probably 80% of all known diseases of body and mind, so this is no news and AS and AN are not more connected than genes and behavior in general.
I have a brain injury centered around the pons extending into the cerebellum and to the amygdala, and even more I think. Recently I really started to do alot of research in regard to personality differences which centers around this area. Autism spectrum disorders come from this region, Well… autopsies of autism spectrum personalities have damage to this region of the brain. The interesting thing is that supposedly pons disorder produces anorexia issues. This is a link to pons disorder information http://www.nwneuro.info/?q=node/57 (Northwest Neurodevelopmental Training Center)and I can’t find the link to autism autopsy information but will post if I can. I think there is a link it’s just that as one of the best and kindest books I’ve ever read on Neuro diversity, The Adolescent and Adult Neuro-diversity Handbook by Sarah Hendrickx, said neuro causes of problems are never fully the same from one person to the other. There is a group of disorders closely linked and they are like a personal cocktail for each individual who has significant problems. Who knows how far research will ever get with this region of the brain as its highly fragile. I really shouldn’t be alive with my level of damage to this region. Personally I find that both aspergers and the anorexic personality, I call it, explains so much of who I am. Plus weirldly I found out I have dysgraphia. How the brain interprets language in different ways is also in this region. The brain is a weird thing and doctors arn’t always concerned enough, forthcoming or aware of advancements in research. Hope this has been useful to someone.
Just wanted to add that I think that both aspergers and anorexia are both brain issues. Trying to ignore this is a stupid form of Psychological CBT which may work occasionally but for those that fail and fail to get things right, a really brain problem needs to be acknowledged. I can’t wait till the psychological and the medical community start to realize that not everything is able to be fixed through ignoring the reality of these things. This mindset never will serve the people that are beset by these problems. Sorry for the rant, I just read the last persons post that suggested aspergers wasn’t a real thing. I have also heard this from other sources and this thinking never really helps anyone in the long run.
This is a very interesting debate. I had serious eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia) as a teenager, and three people in my family are on the autism spectrum. Perhaps there is a link, perhaps it is co-morbidity.