Original title: Are men still being missed in eating disorder care? Gender differences in psychopathology and transdiagnostic severity profiles across a 10-year clinical sample
Researchers looked at adults assessed at one specialist eating-disorder center in Bologna, Italy, from 2014 to 2024. Men made up 7.9% of patients, and binge eating disorder was more common among men, while anorexia and bulimia were more common among women. The team grouped patients by overall illness severity and found low, moderate, and high profiles shared across genders. Men more often fit the moderate profile; women more often fit the high profile.
Imagine a clinic sorting people into groups based on how much help they need. The hard part is that two people can need different kinds of help while still fitting the same overall level. In this paper, those levels are the groups, and the patients’ eating-disorder symptoms and other measured difficulties help determine which group they fit.
Eating disorders affect men as well as women, but men were a small minority of patients seeking specialist care. The differences found in diagnosis and severity profiles may help clinicians notice that men’s experiences do not always look like the patterns more common among women.
The abstract describes patients assessed at one specialized center in Bologna, Italy, so it does not establish whether the same patterns hold in other services or populations. It also does not report whether men’s share of patients changed over the 10-year period, or explain why men were underrepresented.
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Are men still being missed in eating disorder care? Gender differences in psychopathology and transdiagnostic severity profiles across a 10-year clinical sample — Silvia Tempia Valenta, F. Marcolini, Marinella Di Stani et al. — Journal of Eating Disorders — doi:10.1186/s40337-026-01790-9
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.