Screening of Binge Eating in a community mental health service

EDNOS (Eating disorder not otherwise specified) accounts for three quarters of all community cases with eating disorders (Bulik et al., 2007). Among EDNOS, the most common (Hudson et al., 2007) is Binge Eating Disorder (BED). BED is a good diagnostic construct and a stable condition, associated with elevated psychiatric comorbidity and impairment in psychosocial functioning (Pope et al., 2006). The few available epidemiological studies in Italy suggest a lifetime prevalence of 0.64% for EDNOS (Favarelli et al., 2006), whereas in other samples lifetime estimated prevalences of sub-threshold BED and any binge eating are 0.72%, and 2.15% respectively (Preti et al., 2009). The comorbidity of BED and other psychiatric diagnoses is high: overall, 73.8% of patients with BED have one additional lifetime psychiatric disorder and 43.1% have at least one current psychiatric disorder (Javaras et al., 2008). Though often associated with obesity, BED should be considered a separate condition (Hudson et al., 2007). This disorder often goes undetected and untreated both in primary care and general psychiatric services (StriegelMoore et al., 2010). Mond et al. (2007) have shown that only a small percentage of subjects with BED (22.8%) receive a specific treatment for eating problems in primary care setting. In MHS, time constraints usually prevent clinicians from administering clinical interviews intended for EDs diagnosis. The utility of questionnaires as a screening for BED seem clear (Freitas et al., 2006). Among available tools, one of the most used and validated is the Binge Eating Scale questionnaire (Gormally et al., 1982). The main assumptions of this study were