The relationship between self-control and symptoms of anxiety and depression in patients with eating disorders: a cross-sectional study including exploratory longitudinal data
Abstract
Eating disorders (EDs) are mental disorders characterized by a persevering behavioral disturbance in eating and distress in thoughts or emotions, significantly impairing psychosocial function and/or physical health. Anxiety and depression are common in patients with EDs. Studies have indicated that personality style may impact the onset, clinical presentation, and recovery from an ED. Personality style can be studied in terms of self-control, ranging from over- to undercontrol. However, it remains unknown how self-control relates to anxiety/depression in patients with EDs and its stability during ED treatment. This is what we aimed to investigate in this study, collecting data before treatment in 227 adult patients from a Swedish outpatient ED clinic, with 14 also completing post-treatment measurements. Our results indicated that global anxiety/depression levels in patients with EDs were not strongly correlated with levels of self-control, but rather with ED symptoms. Nevertheless, anxiety seemed to increase with increasing levels of undercontrol and extreme values of both over- and undercontrol showed a tendency to be associated with higher levels of depression. In the exploratory analyses self-control levels remained more stable during treatment than global anxiety/depression levels, which decreased significantly. Background Personality style can partly be described as the way an individual controls and regulates emotions and can be divided into over- and undercontrol.…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a cross-sectional, done in people. Its evidence level is 4 of 5 (Low · observational). Observational designs can show an association but not prove cause. Reported size: 227 participants or records.
Read the paper
Related studies
- The Matrisome: In Silico Definition and In Vivo Characterization by Proteomics of Normal and Tumor Extracellular Matrices
- The Escherichia coli MG1655 in silico metabolic genotype: Its definition, characteristics, and capabilities
- In silico pharmacology for drug discovery: methods for virtual ligand screening and profiling
- In silico prediction of splice-altering single nucleotide variants in the human genome
- In silico clinical trials: how computer simulation will transform the biomedical industry
- In silico optimization of a guava antimicrobial peptide enables combinatorial exploration for peptide design
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.