Patients with familial hypercholesterolemia may be more vulnerable to eating disorders
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A study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that patients with familial hypercholesterolemia may have elevated risk for developing eating disorders.
“No previous studies have investigated risk of [eating disorders] in individuals with FH. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate if individuals with genetically verified FH, who are likely to have received extensive diet- and lifestyle counselling, have a higher risk of incident [eating disorders] compared to age and sex matched controls,” Eli B. Urke, MSc, research assistant at the University of Oslo, and colleagues wrote.
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The researchers used the Norwegian Patient Registry and the Norwegian Cause of Death Registry to identify FH (n = 5,602) and control (n = 110,526) populations for the study; those with FH were diagnosed between January 1992 and May 2014. The mean age at start of follow-up was 37.5 years in the FH population and 37.2 years in the control population.
The researchers found that eating disorders were more prevalent in women in both populations. In the FH group, 94.3% of those diagnosed with an eating disorder were women, and in the control group 88.4% of those with an eating disorder were women.
Researchers found that eating disorder incident rates per 1,000 person-years was 0.64 (95% CI, 0.45-0.88) in the FH population and 0.39 (95% CI, 0.36-0.43) in the control population. Those with FH had higher risk for eating disorders compared with controls (HR = 1.67; 95% CI, 1.18-2.35), and the difference was more pronounced in women (HR = 1.78; 95% CI, 1.24-2.54).
“Although dietary counselling for FH is important and not very restrictive (mostly in line with national guidelines), the desire to comply with the dietary treatment to reduce risk of premature disease, may lead some patients to develop an unhealthy relation with food,” Urke and colleagues wrote. “How this impacts treatment and later cardiovascular risk is at present unknown. Thus, more research is needed to explore potential triggers of [eating disorders] in FH and the long-term consequences.”
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