Cheri Levinson, PhD, is director of the Eating Anxiety Treatment Laboratory and a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. Her research interests include eating disorders, anxiety disorders, comorbidity, treatment development, anorexia nervosa, and fears of weight gain.
We have had three grants terminated that were focused on either preventing eating disorders from developing in children and adolescents or creating new treatments for individuals of all ages with eating disorders. I'm worried about the patients in our trials who may not get treatment, and about the state of treatment science in this field. Only 50% of adults and youth respond to the evidence-based treatments currently available -- if they are even able to access care -- and we were finally starting to develop treatments that are more successful. I don't know if people understand how dire the situation is for people with eating disorders. Every 52 minutes someone dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder in the United States, and 1 in 5 children show disordered eating worldwide.
The funding was cut for two of my PhD students and one postdoctoral fellow when NIH terminated many grants that were created specifically to support minority scholars. One PhD student was creating a machine learning algorithm to predict the onset of eating disorders in children ages 8 to 12. We were collecting data from parents and children about anxiety, social media use, sensitivity to physical sensation, and other factors to build models that could someday be used in electronic health records to alert pediatricians when a child is at higher risk of an eating disorder. Another project was led by a postdoctoral fellow who was looking into physical complications that can affect eating disorder treatment. For example, if someone with diabetes or cancer has an eating disorder, these patients will likely need a different treatment regimen than the standard of care.
The third study was led by a PhD student who was creating a better prediction model for eating disorder relapses. More than half of people with eating disorders end up relapsing after treatment, and this student was investigating the cognitive, environmental, and behavioral characteristics that lead up to relapse. This could include eating and social contexts that contribute to relapse, such as restricting food a little bit or going to a restaurant. If we know more about the factors that increase the risk of relapse, clinicians can be more aware of the warning signs that they may need to intervene.
All three of these studies were trainee projects, and the funding cuts are jeopardizing the future of psychology. These students have come from all over the world to learn how to do cutting-edge work so they can build their own research programs and be the next generation of mental health scientists.
We are seeing children in the clinic now who are 7 and 8 years old with full-blown eating disorders, and I never saw people this young when I started in the field 15 years ago. This is a life-threatening illness that can be a chronic condition for the rest of someone's life. To cut off research for an illness that is killing our kids doesn't make sense. I've had many trainees ask if they should start looking for other career options, and the funding cuts send the message that their work is not important.