Dopamine and Responses to Food in EDs
'Why is recovering from ED so hard?'. It can be difficult to understand why and how eating can be so difficult for someone. If you have read around this blog, you will likely have noticed that I am very interested in the brain/hormone changes that occur with ED. You will have also noticed that there are many of these changes, thus partially accounting for the changes we see in people who battle EDs. Well, yet another study now gives us more insight into why eating for ED patients is so hard ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eat.20937/full ). This study found that in patients with ED, eating does not stimulate the 'reward' centre in the brain (the dopamine system, DA). In people without ED, eating causes DA release, which makes our brains realize that it is 'happy' or 'good'. As a result, our brains learn that food = happy and food = reward and food = good. But, what if our brains DID NOT release DA when we ate? What would h...