Born to Be Anorexic?

Critics often blame the fashion industry as the root cause of anorexia. But new research shows that Karl Lagerfield and co. may be off the hook. The real culprit? The brain.

A group of American psychiatrists - led by Professor Walter Kaye of the University of Pittsburgh - have determined that individuals who succumb to anorexia do so because their brains are wired to make them more vulnerable to the disease, reports The Daily Mail. Whether this means that anorexia is an inherited condition, or a result of abnormal brain development during childhood, however, is unkown.

"This piece of research points to the fact that the brains of people with anorexia are wired differently," says Professor Kaye. "This means they react and think in different way to the ordinary person and that they are likely to go to develop anorexia regardless of whether they have been exposed to images of super-thin models. If it was simply impressionable young girls and women wanting to look like a supermodel, then we would have hundreds of thousands of anorexics."

To get these results, researchers studied the brain activity of former anorexics and compared them to that of non-anorexic volunteers.

After conducting a series of tests to gauge emotional responses in the brain, researchers noted significant differences in the two groups. For example, the group of ex-anorexics did not receive pleasure after winning rewards.

Says Kaye, "A year or more after recovery, these former anorexics still had difficulty in enjoying simple pleasures. What this points to is that anorexics have something different going on in their brains which marks them out has having either different structures in the brain or different pathways for processing of thought, that stay with them for life."

Dr. Ian Frampton of Exeter University seconds this theory.

"We need to move away from this idea that supermodels are to blame," he says.