Abstract
Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious mental disorder with impaired functioning including not only the cognitive and socio-emotional but also physical domains. Improved treatments, especially for adults with AN, are urgently needed. The insights gained from basic research in experimental animal models and the advent of cognitive neuroscience have produced major advances in our understanding of the condition, but translating these into clinical research or practice remains a challenge. We describe here what the eating disorders field can gain from schizophrenia research in this area. We use the example of socio-emotional impairments in AN to describe the iterative process between basic research and intervention development for neurobiologically informed and based treatments for this condition and briefly touch on some other examples that stem from translational science.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Mrs Hannah Broadbent, Mrs Hannah de Jong and Dr. Sebastien Guillaume and the members of URGE, the Utrecht Research Group Eating disorders, for their helpful comments on this chapter. This work was supported by the Marie Curie Research Training Network, INTACT (MRTN-CT-2006-035988), the Swiss Anorexia Foundation, the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and by a Department of Health NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research (Reference number RP-PG-0606-1043). The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of DoH/NIHR.
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Schmidt, U., Oldershaw, A., van Elburg, A. (2010). Translating Experimental Neuroscience into Treatment of Eating Disorders: Two Examples. In: Adan, R., Kaye, W. (eds) Behavioral Neurobiology of Eating Disorders. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, vol 6. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2010_76
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