Professionals at the Medical Center are stepping up efforts to understand and combat eating disorders in the Triangle, opening a new outpatient program and distributing a survey to collect information on eating habits.
"I am struck by the suffering that these patients go through, and certainly by the lack of resources in the area," said Dr. Nancy Zucker, an associate in research in the Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences.
The new outpatient program--set to open in two weeks in Duke Clinic's diabetes research center--was developed because eating disorders, like many mental health conditions, are expensive to treat and not covered by new managed care policies, Zucker said.
"Anorexia requires extended stay in long-term facilities that is not likely to be reimbursed," said Zucker, expressing hope that the outpatient program will address eating disorders from an innovative angle that eliminates some of these costs.
The program draws on professionals from several disciplines, including psychology, adolescent medicine, internal medicine, nursing and nutrition. Its services will be open to all members of the community, including students. The new clinic will be open twice a week to treat patients older than 11 years of age.
In another initiative, Medical Center researchers have recently sent out electronic surveys to undergraduate students at area universities--Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University and Meredith College--to gather information about eating habits.
"There are a lot of people out there who have untrue ideas of what their own bodies could look like and what appropriate and healthy nutrition really is," explained Dr. Terrill Bravender, director of adolescent medicine. "This [study] would help give us some data in terms of who is at risk for these misperceptions as well as what those misperceptions are."
In particular, researchers hope their work will address the stereotype that eating disorders affect only upper middle class white women. They plan to release their findings sometime next fall.
The electronic structure of the survey is a new technique for medical researchers. "Limiting the study to the universities we have here in the Triangle area simplified the study so I could get a better handle on using the technique locally," said Dr. Betty Staples, a fellow in pediatrics. "Perhaps we can expand the study to include universities on the more national level in the future."
Bravender said about 20,000 to 30,000 students have received the survey and that researchers will send them out again in early February to give students who may have missed the survey a second chance to respond.
Researchers hope to benefit from studying eating disorders within the geographic confines of the Triangle in particular.
"The external [geographic] factors in the Triangle area are the same for the students despite the fact that the internal factors within the institutions are significantly different," Bravender said.
The study and new outpatient program come one semester after a column in The Chronicle by sophomore Mary Adkins sparked greater student interest in the issue at Duke.
In December, Duke Student Government passed a resolution calling for the hiring of an eating disorder coordinator.
Currently, eating disorder services are handled by three separate groups: the student-run awareness group Educational Support to Eliminate Eating Misconceptions, Student Health and Counseling and Psychological Services.
Mollie Page, former president of ESTEEM, said she feels eating disorders are a large problem on campus and that concrete numbers will help demonstrate the need for more resources.
"I think it's hard to find a Duke student who doesn't know someone who has struggled with disordered eating at some point in their lives, if they themselves have not," Page said.
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