Word: maudsley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...addition, says Janet Treasure, director of the Maudsley Eating Disorders Unit, past research suggests that about 15% to 20% of patients with anorexia may also have Asperger's syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder. Research also shows that the conditions occur together in families more often than they would by chance. It's possible, she says, that the same genetic predisposition for autism and anorexia may be expressed differently depending on gender. (Read "A Link Between Autism and Testosterone...
Treasure's colleagues at the Maudsley Hospital say current treatments are equally obsolete. In the late 1980s, the British researchers published the earliest studies describing what has become known as the Maudsley method of treating anorexia in teens - and it remains the only therapy that has proved effective in controlled trials. Unlike traditional treatment, which assumes that anorexia is caused by environmental factors and low self-esteem and often involves intense therapy at residential treatment centers, the outpatient Maudsley method does not focus on psychological therapies or on "parent-ectomy" - removing the teen from the home...
Essentially, Treasure and her colleagues have abandoned the idea that family dysfunction causes eating disorders and instead enlist the family to help guide patients' recovery. Most recently, the Maudsley method has also incorporated a new type of cognitive behavioral therapy, based on the autism connection, which aims to broaden the narrow thinking routines of people with anorexia. "We try to get them be more flexible," she says, "They want to have these rigid habits and we try to get them to break out of that and see the bigger picture...
...Laura Collins' 14-year-old daughter, who developed anorexia in 2002. "She ate an apple and thought she could see her arm growing," says Collins, who says it was clear that her daughter's condition was more than an obsession with being fashionably thin. Collins read about the Maudsley method in a newspaper article and sought clinicians who were willing to try it. "In the U.S., almost all treatment is predicated on blaming or marginalizing the parents," Collins says. Today, her daughter is thriving in college, and Collins runs a group called FEAST, which is dedicated to helping families find...
Meanwhile, researchers like Kaye have launched a six-site National Institutes of Health-funded clinical trial to compare the Maudsley method to more traditional family therapies. At U.C. San Diego, Kaye's group also provides affected families a weeklong intensive introduction to the Maudsley method. "At first," he says, he thought it was "preposterous" that such a short period of treatment would help at all, but "now I'm a believer. It doesn't work for everyone, but it does work...