Anorexia nervosa: how to predict and prevent the risk of relapse?

It is a reflection. Juliette de Salle is in charge of locking the access door to the apartment of which she has been a part for a year. At 49, she became a “peer health advocate.” In other words, she’s an expert patient. “To be a peer mediator, you have to go through the troubles. I reached adolescence, at the age of 16, I first suffered from anorexia and then from bulimia”, testifies this trained architect.

“Fill a Gap”

Cela fait 18 ans qu’elle s’estime guérie, après quinze années d’idees obsessionnelles sur la nourriture : “Au bout de 15 ans, j’ai pu dire, je n’ai plus besoin des TCA (troubles des conduites alimentaires, NDLR). Les TCA ont été une protection, à un momento où je n’avais pas le choix. also.”

Juliette de Salle now helps patients at GHU Paris Psychiatry, along with Chloé Tezenas du Montcel, a psychiatrist. “Anorexia affects between 0.9% and 1.5% of women,” she explains. “There is great heterogeneity in the geographical representation of the disease, also in the ratio of men to women, the ratio is 9 to 12 women for one man.”

“Not all of us are equal in the face of malnutrition”

The head of the clinic has been working for two and a half years on an ambitious thesis project: what is the impact of prolonged malnutrition on brain function. And how can a dietary restriction become permanent in some people?

“Not all of us are equal in the face of malnutrition,” he says. Some people will not trigger an eating disorder in a dieting episode. Others will have a loss of control in the face of this increasingly important food restriction.

Chloé Tezenas cites in particular genetic, psychological and environmental risk factors that can interact and promote the onset of the disease.

Identify “biomarkers” in the blood

In the long term, the specialist wants to be able to predict, at the time of hospital discharge, which patients will need a little more support: “Our objective is not to identify who will develop anorexia but, among the patients we receive, who are at risk of developing anorexia. more chronic form of the disease,” he explains.

“I’m trying to identify metabolic biomarkers in the blood that might be correlated with more chronic forms of the disease and relapses,” he explains.

Among the possible explanations considered by the researchers, an alteration in the regulation of hormones that control appetite in patients who develop a form of chronic anorexia.