By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
Like many women in high school, Ella (not her real name) had days when she struggled with self-esteem.
“I was able to get through it because I had sports, I had friends and I had school. Then came the pandemic in March (2020) and I lost everything,” said Ella, who looks younger than her 15.
“I looked to do something proactive to help me cope, so I turned to exercise. I ran almost every day. I did motorcycle rides and one hour walks.
She herself, Ella’s mother, Alice (who is also not her real name), was thrilled to see her daughter adopt such healthy behavior during the sad months of confinement in her hometown of Ottawa, Canada. But she soon realized that if She didn’t exercise, she looked nervous and upset.
“I couldn’t go down. I couldn’t enjoy things like watching a movie anymore because I felt like I had to be active all the time,” Alice said.
“I couldn’t stop. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t,” Ella said. “One point, I didn’t even like the exercise. I just felt like I had to.
She said her desire to exercise has intensified. In June 2020, he told his mother that he was losing weight.
“It was almost like it was controlled by an alien,” Alice said. “In a minute it would be fine, but if you tried to make her eat or prevent her from exercising, you would see in her eyes that she would do it very intensely.
“I don’t talk to her anymore. I don’t talk to this alien anymore, or anything.
Alice’s growing worry turned into fear. She and her husband began looking for a dietitian, counseling, or any kind of facility. “It took us months to be able to access those facilities at this level of pandemic. “
Across town, at children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Dr. Mark Norris is busier than ever. As a pediatric eating disorder specialist, Norris used to be called to the emergency room to evaluate a young patient.
At the beginning of the summer, “I called the emergency room more than ever in my career,” Norris said. Urgent requests for consultation from the parents involved have also increased, he said.
The highest demand began “almost immediately” after the lockdown was relaxed in June, he said, and his team “soon had more patients in the hospital than I had ever seen. “
Eating disorders are caused or exacerbated by stress, so, like many experts, Norris was concerned that disorders caused by the pandemic would cause a relapse in other young people (and adults) who were recovering from known eating disorders.
While this was happening, Norris said he was surprised to find that many other young people who came to the emergency room had never shown symptoms of an eating disorder in the past.
He was part of a team that evaluated 48 teens in mid-2020 in their reports with an eating disorder. When asked what they thought had triggered their illness, 40 percent of young people blamed the effects of the pandemic, Norris said.
There were also other unexpected discoveries.
“In the first six months of the pandemic in particular, we detected that patients were presenting with a lower weight than we were used to seeing before the pandemic, and that those patients were having health problems very quickly,” Norris said.
Norris and his team will later publish those effects in the June 2021 Journal of Eating Disorders.
Surveys at other pediatric hospitals in Canada and the U. S. U. S. researchers discovered a similar development in youth evaluated and hospitalized for eating disorders during the summer and fall of 2020. A circle of relatives contacted Dr. Norris, Dr. David Little, who worked as a clinical computer scientist. at the Epic Health Research Network, which produces electronic medical records.
“Dr. Norris advised that we analyze data from the EPIC database, which has more than a hundred million patients in the U. S. “”Little, a family doctor in Verona, Wisconsin, said.
“In 80 hospitals, we saw a 25% increase in eating disorder admissions after the pandemic began in March (2020) compared to pre-pandemic trends,” Little said.
The increase was even greater when women were particularly sought: 30%, Little said. “The attractive thing is that when we look at other diagnoses of intellectual fitness (anxiety, depression, and even suicide attempts), we see small increases. But nothing more dramatic than 30% of the number of adolescent women hospitalized for anorexia and other eating disorders.
Statistics show that calls to youth and adult eating disorder hotlines have triggered the pandemic.
Chelsea Kronengold, associate director of communications for the National Eating Disorders Association, said the association’s hotline has noted “a 107 percent increase in contacts since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “
“Despite two years of the pandemic, our helpline volume continues to grow,” Kronengold told CNN via email. Based on other people’s contacts who revealed their ages, he said the majority of people seeking help in 2021 were between the ages of thirteen and 24.
After delaying the plans, Ella was evaluated despite everything in September 2020. But according to his mother, this specialist considered that his weight loss was “on the edge” and decided that the family would pass normal blood tests and others. important checks until a hospital bed in the eating disorders unit became available.
“Now she runs part of the marathons alone,” Alice said. “It’s out of control. He didn’t know how to make her stay at home. I rode my bike next to her, terrified that something might happen, that she didn’t have enough power to do that.
Weight alone is an imperfect remedy criterion, experts say, but a threshold was required before Ella could be considered an inpatient service.
Months passed without Ella meeting those criteria, and despite everything in January “it was our family doctor who said: ‘You have to go to the emergency room. ‘ We went there that morning and a few hours later Ella was admitted. Alice mentioned.
“They said his blood tests were not and his major symptoms were in a complicated situation. And I don’t forget to feel a lot of guilt for all of this, you know, like, ‘How can I let this happen?’
“But we were told that (She) is essentially controlled through a disease right now,” Alice continued. “She is not herself. You’re talking to someone who can’t process the data like they used to. “
He told his circle of relatives to externalize the disease, to see the eating disorder as an external entity or a “bully” threatening their child: “It’s a disease, not something of the child, and in fact it’s not the child’s fault. “
With young people and teenagers, he explained, this “tyrant” must be in control.
“He’s going to try to isolate the child, try to restrict the help that the eating disorder could threaten,” he said. “So the eating disorder is going unnoticed, so to speak, because the individual has discovered tactics to be able to have some of those symptoms and not alarm the caregiver at home.
“While there may be a component of your brain that actually recognizes that you want Array, there is another component that you may not be interested in getting or not seeing the array desire,” Norris said.
“My task is for the child to perceive that even though a giant part of his brain feels that the eating disorder is there for him, it really isn’t. “
Today, Ella says she’s doing well, completing her senior year of top school and eager to move on to college. He remains an outpatient with Dr. Norris and his team.
“Dr. Norris confided in me that a full recovery is possible, but it can take time,” Ella said. a long way. But there is still a long way to go. “
Eating disorders come to the fore when internal misery increases, Norris explained. While there is no single cause, experts say food insecurity, trauma and abuse in the formative years, gender role concerns and stressful life events can all contribute to this. Recent studies indicate that genetics may also play a role.
Now, it turns out that the consequences of Covid-19 would possibly be a prime example of such stress.
“Emerging evidence suggests that the pandemic itself is acting as a trigger,” Norris said.
During the pandemic, young people turn to other activities that develop their vulnerability and sensitivity to eating disorders, he said. “A lot of what we hear from other young people is about social isolation or social malnutrition, so to speak. “
This includes engaging in more solitary activities, “such as exercising only than organizational activities,” Norris explained. “For others, it’s about spending more time online, visiting internet sites and checking social media, which is possibly not in their general interest of progress. . “
An overwhelming demand for facilities as likely means cases like Ella’s are addressed as temporarily as necessary, a fact that worries specialists like Norris.
“It’s about trying to succeed in patients as temporarily as possible, because the longer an eating disorder has been present, the harder it is to treat,” Norris said.
“Awareness is the number one message,” Little said, “not only for fitness professionals, but also for families, parents, youth, school systems and the network in general. Because for as long as those young people have access to the medical profession, they are sick.
There’s still another problem: Most of the patients hospitalized at Norris Hospital have been hospitalized due to anorexia nervosa, a type of eating disorder that manifests as an intense concern about gaining weight due to a distorted image. Many other people suffer from weight loss so high that they become medically serious and are assigned hospital beds, Norris said.
However, there are many other types of eating disorders, including bulimia, in which other people overeat and then purge, which may not get the skill they need, he said.
“It’s hard. Even though we know many other people suffer, there are only a limited number of providers with the expertise to treat an eating disorder,” Norris said. “Obviously, we are doing everything we can for those who want to be admitted in those life-threatening conditions, yet for every patient admitted to the hospital, there are a number of patients who are not.
“Will those patients be able to access a point of care that will put them on the road to recovery?”
El-CNN-Wire™
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