Eating Disorders, Obesity
Conditions
Keywords
Eating Disorders, Obesity, Body Dissatisfaction, Female
Brief summary
This three-site effectiveness trial will test whether a brief dissonance-based eating disorder prevention program produces intervention effects when college counselors, psychologists, and nurses are responsible for participant recruitment, screening, and intervention delivery under ecologically valid conditions.
Detailed description
Threshold and subthreshold eating disorders affect over 10% of young women and are associated with functional impairment, distress, psychiatric comorbidity, medical complications, mortality, and risk for obesity onset. Accordingly, a pressing public healthy priority is to develop effective prevention programs for eating pathology. The proposed project will be the first effectiveness trial to test whether an eating disorder prevention program with strong empirical support from efficacy trials produces effects under ecologically valid conditions among high-risk female college students, which is a vital step toward widespread dissemination of programs developed with NIH funding. The proposed cost-effectiveness analyses and examination of process factors that predict larger intervention effects will also represent novel contributions to the literature.
Interventions
BEHAVIORALBody Project
Participants in this intervention attend four 1-hour group meetings (one per week for four consecutive weeks) in which they complete a series of written and verbal exercises intended to increase body satisfaction.
Sponsors
University of Texas at Austin
Drexel University
Oregon Research Institute
Study design
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
SINGLE (Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
FEMALE
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
* (1) is a registered student at a participating school, (2) self-reports body image concerns
Exclusion criteria
* meets DSM-IV criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| eating disorder symptoms, risk for future eating disorder and obesity onset | 2 years |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| mediators to intervention effects | 2 years | We will test whether the dissonance program intervention effects are mediated by change in thin-ideal internalization |
| moderators to program effects | 2 years | We will test whether certain factors moderate program effects (e.g., initial body dissatisfaction level). |
Countries
United States
Outcome results
None listed