The 3rd week of mental health research is coming to an end. An event organized by the Foundation for Medical Research, of which BFMTV is a partner, intended to highlight the new challenges of research. Among them, to better understand the mechanisms involved in anorexia nervosa, an essentially female disease.
It’s a reflex. Juliette de Salle takes care to securely lock the access door to the department she has been part of for a year. At 49, she became a “peer health mediator”. In other words, expert patient. “To be a peer mediator, you have to go through the troubles. Arrived in adolescence, at the age of 16, I suffered first from anorexia and then from bulimia”, testifies this architect by training.
“Fill a gap”
It’s been 18 years that she considers herself cured, following fifteen years of obsessive ideas regarding food: “After 15 years, I was able to say, I no longer need TCAs (eating disorders, Ed). Also.”
Juliette de Salle now helps patients at GHU Paris Psychiatry, alongside Chloé Tezenas du Montcel, psychiatrist. “Anorexia affects between 0.9% and 1.5% of women,” she explains. “There is great heterogeneity in the geographical representation of the disease, also in the ratio of men to women, the ratio is 9 to 12 women for one man.”
“Not all are equal in the face of undernutrition”
The head of clinic has been working for two and a half years on an ambitious thesis project: what is the impact of prolonged undernutrition on brain function. And how can a dietary restriction become permanent in some people?
“We are not all equal in the face of undernutrition,” she says. Some people will not trigger an eating disorder in a dieting episode. Others will have a loss of control in the face of this increasingly important food restriction.
Chloé Tezenas cites in particular genetic, psychological and environmental risk factors that can interact and promote the emergence of the disease.
Identify “biomarkers” in the blood
In the long term, the specialist wishes to be able to predict, at the time of discharge from hospital, which patients will need a little more support: “Our goal is not to identify who will develop anorexia but, among patients we receive, who are at risk of developing a more chronic form of the disease,” she explains.
“I’m trying to identify metabolic biomarkers in the blood that might be correlated with more chronic forms of the disease and relapses,” she explains.
Among the possible explanations considered by the researchers, a disturbance in the regulation of hormones controlling appetite in patients who develop a form of chronic anorexia.
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