Diagnosis and Evaluation of Eating Disorders in the Pediatric Patient.

Recognizing eating disorders in the pediatric population can be challenging for outpatient providers. With the high prevalence of these disorders in children and adolescents, it is critical that pediatricians recognize these disorders and connect these children and families with available treatments. This article provides a review of the current diagnostic criteria for pica, rumination disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, binge-eating disorder, other specified feeding or eating disorder, and unspecified feeding or eating disorder as described in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition.

Neural activations are related to body-shape, anxiety, and outcomes in adolescent anorexia nervosa.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an illness that frequently begins during adolescence and involves weight loss. Two groups of adolescent girls (AN-A, weight-recovered following AN) and (HC-A, healthy comparison) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging task involving social evaluations, allowing comparison of neural activations during self-evaluations, friend-evaluations, and perspective-taking self-evaluations. Although the two groups were not different in their whole-brain activations, anxiety and body shape concerns were correlated with neural activity in a priori regions of interest.