BEDREHELSE-Bedre helse og livskvalitet

The present project examined how the brain and cognitive functions are affected by anorexia. The methods used were neuropsychological/cognitive testing and functional brain imaging with MR. Patients were examined when they were in the acute disease phase of anorexia and at 10 months after the first examination. The patients who attended were girls/women between 15 and 18 years old. The patients were compared to healthy girls/women of the same age, and these have performed the same neuropsychological tests and brain imaging procedures at the same time intervals as the patients. The data collection is now completed and one of three scheduled articles is published. The main findings of the project are that patients with anorexia compared to healthy controls have reduced the volume of the hippocampus and thinner cortex, and that these anatomical changes have significant relationships with measures of cognitive and affective symptoms. Another important finding was that, despite cerebral anatomical changes, the girls with anorexia did not have significantly lower general cognitive abilities than healthy girls of the same age. The forthcoming articles from the present project examines the relationship between the effect of cortical thinning on cognitive and affective psychological measures, and how the brain's network of cognitive functions is affected by severe anorexia.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe eating disorder with the one of the highest mortality rates of all psychiatric disorders. Previous neuroimaging studies have focused on specific brain areas that might be important for the symptoms and progression of the disorder, but structural or functional deficits in single cerebral areas are insufficient to explain all symptoms of AN. Several studies have shown that patients with AN displays reduced performance on cognitive tests that measures executive functions (pl anning, response inhibition, cognitive changes, implementation of activity) when compared to individuals without AN. Also, performance in respect of visuospatial tests, visual attention, learning and memory is reduced at group level when compared to peopl e without AN. The present project will use advanced brain imaging techniques (Functional MRI, Structural MRI , Diffusion tensor imaging, Resting state functional Connectivity) in combination with neuropsychological testing to investigate whether brain net works rather than single cerebral areas could explain cognitive deficits in patients with AN. 40 hospitalized Girls/women between the ages of 12 to 20 years diagnosed with AN will be included from the University Hospital North-Norway and Oslo University H ospital. 40 healthy age matched controls will be recruited as control group. Neuropsychological testing and MRI examinations will be performed after admission, and nine months after. The control group will undergo the same examinations with the same inter val. We hypothesize that the patient group will display lower performance on test for executive functions compared to the control group and also lower scores compared to normative data. We expect that the reduction in neuropsychological functioning can be explained by lower functional connectivity in cerebral executive networks, and structural changes in cerebral tissue. It is applied for salary and expenses for one PhD student for three years.