A new report estimates that the global incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa rose 71% between 1990 and 2023. The researchers estimate that 18.1 million people had one of these two disorders in 2023, and they project 21.8 million by 2050.
The study was led by Ruhai Bai at the Children's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University in China and published in JAMA Psychiatry. The team combined data from studies and surveys across the world and used statistical models to fill gaps. They estimated annual incidence for 204 countries and territories. They also calculated disability-adjusted life years, which measure years of healthy life lost. In 2023, the two disorders cost the world about 3.83 million years of healthy life, according to Bai. The study did not explore the causes of the rise, though Bai notes that population growth cannot fully explain it.
Cheri Levinson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Louisville who was not involved in the study, says she is seeing more patients with more severe symptoms than at any other time in her career. She says many of them are misusing GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Levinson says that anorexia and bulimia make up less than half of all eating disorders, and she believes the true impact is prob