<div><p>NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - "Out of control" binge eaters who get help from a therapist do better in the short-term than people who use self-help techniques, new research shows.</p><p>But in the long-term, self-help and therapist-led or therapist-assisted approaches seem to have about the same effectiveness, Dr. Carol B. Peterson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her colleagues found.</p><p>Binge eaters often eat large amounts of food while feeling a loss of control over their eating. It is different from the binge-purge syndrome of bulimia because binge eaters do not purge afterward by vomiting or taking laxatives. Binge eating disorder is contributing to the rise in obesity.</p><p>While medications can help reduce bingeing episodes among people with the disorder, psychotherapy is the most effective approach to treatment, Peterson and colleagues note in a report in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Self-help interventions have also shown promise.</p><p>Peterson's team compared the effectiveness of various group therapy approaches by randomly assigning 259 adults with binge eating disorder to 20 weeks of therapist-led, therapist-assisted, or self-help group therapy, or to a waiting list.</p><p>After treatment, just over half of people who had therapist-led group treatment were abstaining from bingeing, compared to a third of those in the therapist-assisted groups, 18 percent in the self-help groups, and 10 percent in the waiting list group. The frequency of binge eating was also lower in the therapist-led or assisted groups compared to the self-help group or the waiting list group.</p><p>When the researchers followed up 6 and 12 months after treatment ended, they found no difference in bingeing abstinence rates or binge eating frequency among the groups.</p><p>However, the study participants who got help from therapists were more likely to stick with the treatment for 20 weeks; 88 percent of people in the therapist-led groups and 81 percent of those in the therapist-assisted groups completed 20 weeks of treatment, compared to 68 percent of people in the self-help groups.</p><p>"The presence of a therapist may enhance short-term abstinence and reduce the likelihood of dropout," Peterson and her team say. But self-help groups may be helpful when therapists aren't available, they add.</p><p>"These findings suggest that self-help group treatment may be a viable alternative to therapist-led interventions in some settings," Dr. Walter Kaye of the University of California San Diego writes in an editorial accompanying the study.</p><p>"It should be noted, however, that the power of such treatments may be limited since many patients continued to have substantial degrees of binge behaviors at 12-month follow-up," Kaye notes.</p><p>SOURCE: American Journal of Psychiatry, December 2009.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=65660284&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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