Exercise moderates longitudinal group psychopathology networks in individuals with eating disorders.

Compr Psychiatry

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA; Department of Pediatrics, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA.

Published: January 2025

AI Article Synopsis

  • Individuals with eating disorders often exercise despite potential long-term negative impacts, but it may temporarily reduce symptoms.
  • A new method was used to analyze how exercise affects the relationship between different eating disorder symptoms in 102 people over several days.
  • The findings suggest that exercise can lessen the influence of certain ED symptoms on each other, and indicate a need for further research on the long-term effects of exercise in treating eating disorders.

Article Abstract

Individuals with eating disorders (EDs) often engage in exercise no matter potential negative long-term outcomes (e.g., weight loss, injury). Yet exercising may temporarily attenuate ED symptoms, but whether exercise also affects network structure and pairwise associations of ED symptoms remained unclear. We used a novel approach called Moderated Multilevel Graphical Vector Autoregression to estimate changes in psychopathology networks from before to after exercising in ecological momentary assessment data from 102 individuals with EDs across multiple days (M = 22.14, SD = 5.40; range: 6-22 days) at 4 times daily. Between-person and within-person temporal networks were computed, obtaining stable centrality coefficients for temporal networks only. In those, autoregressive effects of several symptoms, including binge-eating, overeating, or weighing oneself, were attenuated when participants previously exercised. Exercise mostly downregulated temporal effects of ED symptoms on other symptoms, including effects of binge eating and other compensatory behaviors on feeling guilty after the most recent meal, vomiting on weighing oneself, and overeating on fear of weight gain. Our study highlights the complex dynamic effects of exercise on ED symptoms in daily life and calls for novel studies investigating mechanisms of exercise to inform treatments targeting detrimental long-term effects of exercise in EDs.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2024.152543DOI Listing

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