Self-starvation

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychological and potentially life-threatening eating disorder. The activity-based anorexia (ABA) mouse model is commonly used to investigate physiological abnormalities associated with this disorder. Characterizing the holistic biochemical alterations induced by anorexia is essential to understanding AN pathophysiology as well as to define biomarkers for prognosis. METHODS: To unravel the adaptive biochemical mechanisms occurring in this model in response to self-starvation, the urinary, plasma and fecal metabolic phenotypes of mice under different experimental conditions were compared...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe eating disorder that is characterized by significant weight loss as a result of self-starvation. Little is known about the mechanisms that allow these patients to endure self-starvation for long periods of time. It has been suggested that the neurocognitive mechanism responsible for stopping inappropriate actions (i.e., response inhibition) may contribute to this process. However, empirical evidence to support this notion is lacking. The goal of the current study was to assess if exposure to high-calorie food stimuli may trigger response inhibition to a greater extent in adolescents with AN compared to healthy adolescents...

Anorexia nervosa is a chronic disorder of children, adolescents and young people typically characterised by self-starvation and resistance to interventions. Staff dealing with these young people frequently question patient motivations and the ethics of interventions that may be applied against the wishes of patients. The question of withdrawal of care in a subgroup of these patients has been raised. Futility is not an appropriate response to adolescent anorexia nervosa, and treatment withdrawal is not appropriate for a disorder in which most patients can be expected to recover, in which opposition to treatment is a characteristic of the disorder and in which brain dysfunction is precipitated by severe malnutrition...

Individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) show emotion regulation deficits. While individuals with BN use binge eating to regulate negative affect, individuals with restricting-type AN may use self-starvation for this purpose. The current study examined the emotion regulatory function of over- and undereating in response to different emotional states in women with restrictive AN ( n = 54), BN ( n = 47), and women without eating disorders ( n = 68). Participants completed self-report measures assessing the use of emotion regulation strategies and emotional eating...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The aim of this review is to describe animal models that simulate the features of eating disorders. The literature pertaining to animal models that are of relevance for clinical eating disorders and the possible underpinning mechanisms was reviewed using PubMed, Ovid database and Google Scholar. RECENT FINDINGS: New refinements of the circuits regulated by neurotransmitters and neuropeptides which instigate eating behaviours and the various feedback pathways which monitor acute and chronic nutrient status continue to be discovered...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a devastating eating disorder characterized by self-starvation that mainly affects women. Its etiology is unknown, which impedes successful treatment options leading to a limited chance of full recovery. Here, we show that gestation is a vulnerable window that can influence the predisposition to AN. By screening placental microRNA expression of naive and prenatally stressed (PNS) fetuses and assessing vulnerability to activity-based anorexia (ABA), we identify miR-340 as a sexually dimorphic regulator involved in prenatal programming of ABA...

This article conceptualizes Anorexia Nervosa (AN) as a prototypical overcontrolled disorder, characterized by low receptivity and openness, low flexible control, pervasive inhibited emotional expressiveness, low emotional awareness, and low social connectedness and intimacy with others. As a result, individuals with AN often report high levels of emotional loneliness. A new evidence-based treatment, Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT), and its underlying neuroregulatory theory, offer a novel way of understanding how self-starvation and social signaling deficits are used as maladaptive regulation strategies to reduce negative affect...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and extreme weight loss. Pseudoatrophic brain changes are often readily visible in individual brain scans, and AN may be a valuable model disorder to study structural neuroplasticity. Structural magnetic resonance imaging studies have found reduced gray matter volume and cortical thinning in acutely underweight patients to normalize following successful treatment. However, some well-controlled studies have found regionally greater gray matter and persistence of structural alterations following long-term recovery...

Bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa are inextricably linked, with substantial clinical and epidemiological overlaps. Yet, while anorexia has been analyzed extensively in medical anthropology, bulimia remains under-theorized. This is, perhaps, because, compared to self-starvation, binge eating presents a logic of practice that is difficult to reconcile with culturally reified notions of self-control, transcendence, and hard work. Thus, although anthropologists have analyzed anorexic subjectivities as imbued with a sense of cleanliness and purity, moral superiority, and heroics, similar analyses have not been extended to bulimic subjectivities; instead, bulimia has been subsumed, as a tangential disorder, into analyses of anorexia...

The etiology of anorexia nervosa (AN) is still unclear, despite that it is a critical and potentially mortal illness. A recent neurobiological model considers AN as the outcome of dysfunctions in the neuronal processes related to appetite and emotionality (Kaye et al., 2009, 2013). However, this model still is not able to answer a critical question: What is behind body image disturbances (BIDs) in AN? The article starts its analysis from reviewing some of the studies exploring the effects of the serotonin systems in memory (episodic, working, and spatial) and its dysfunctions...

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a disorder characterised by compulsive behaviour, such as self-starvation and excessive exercise, which develop in the pursuit of weight-loss. Recent theory suggests that once established, compulsive weight-loss behaviours in AN may become habitual. In two parallel studies, we measured whether individuals with AN showed a bias toward habits using two outcome-devaluation tasks. In Study 1, 23 women with AN (restrictive and binge/purge subtypes), and 18 healthy controls (HC) completed the slips-of-action paradigm, designed to assess reward-based habits...

The characteristic relentless self-starvation behavior seen in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) has been described as evidence of compulsivity, with increasing suggestion of parallels with addictive behavior. This study used a thematic qualitative analysis to investigate the parallels between compulsive behavior in AN and Substance Use Disorders (SUD). Forty individuals currently suffering from AN completed an online questionnaire reflecting on their experience of compulsive behavior in AN. Eight main themes emerged from thematic qualitative analysis; compulsivity as central to AN, impaired control, escalating compulsions, emotional triggers, negative reactions, detrimental continuation of behavior, functional impairment, and role in recovery...

Angiogenesis is necessary for cancer progression, but antiangiogenic therapy actually promotes tumor recurrence, progression, and metastasis. This study focused on the contribution of the tumor interstitial fluid (TIF) to lung cancer progression. TIF was isolated and quantified for 10 μg protein/mL. Malignant driver characteristics of TIF were examined by tumor-initiating cells (TIC), self-renewal, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), autophagy, and apoptosis in vitro. In vivo tumor model was used to investigate the mechanistic roles of TIF in lung cancer progression...

Autophagy refers to a lysosomal degradative pathway or a process of self-cannibalization. This pathway maintains nutrients levels for vital cellular functions during periods of starvation and it provides cells with survival advantages under various stress situations. However, the mechanisms responsible for the induction and regulation of autophagy are poorly understood. The c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) signal transduction pathway functions to induce defence mechanisms that protect organisms against acute oxidative and xenobiotic insults...

Francisella tularensis is one of the most infectious bacteria known and is the etiologic agent of tularemia. Francisella virulence arises from a 33 kilobase (Kb) pathogenicity island (FPI) that is regulated by the macrophage locus protein A (MglA) and the stringent starvation protein A (SspA). These proteins interact with both RNA polymerase (RNAP) and the pathogenicity island gene regulator (PigR) to activate FPI transcription. However, the molecular mechanisms involved are not well understood. Indeed, while most bacterial SspA proteins function as homodimers to activate transcription, F...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterized by the relentless pursuit to lose weight, mostly through self-starvation, and a distorted body image. AN tends to begin during adolescence among women. However, the underlying neural mechanisms related to AN remain unclear. Using voxel-based morphometry based on magnetic resonance imaging scans, we investigated whether the presence of AN was associated with discernible changes in brain morphology. Participants were 20 un-medicated, right-handed patients with early-onset AN and 14 healthy control subjects...

BACKGROUND: Many women with eating disorders (EDs) have social impairments and difficulties with flexibility. It is unclear to what extent these are manifestations of an underlying autism spectrum disorder (ASD); or whether they are instead the consequence of starvation, anxiety, low mood or obsessive compulsive disorder, all of which are highly prevalent in EDs. The resolution of this clinically and theoretically important uncertainty will require the use of gold-standard ASD assessment measures...

A combined strategy of phosphate (Pi) remobilization from internal and external RNA sources seems to be conserved in plants exposed to Pi starvation. Thus far, the only ribonucleases (RNases) reported to be induced in Nicotiana alata undergoing Pi deprivation are extracellular S-like RNase NE and NnSR1. NnSR1 is a class III non S-RNase of unknown subcellular location. Here, we examine the hypothesis that NnSR1 is an intracellular RNase derived from the self-incompatibility system with specific expression in self-incompatible Nicotiana alata...

Iron is a member of a small group of nutrients that limits aquatic primary production. Mechanisms for utilizing iron have to be efficient and adapted according to the ecological niche. In respect to iron acquisition cyanobacteria, prokaryotic oxygen evolving photosynthetic organisms can be divided into siderophore- and non-siderophore-producing strains. The results presented in this paper suggest that the situation is far more complex. To understand the bioavailability of different iron substrates and the advantages of various uptake strategies, we examined iron uptake mechanisms in the siderophore-producing cyanobacterium Anabaena sp...

Tissue-specific stem cells are thought to resist environmental insults better than their differentiating progeny, but this resistance varies from one tissue to another, and the underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. Here, we use the Drosophila testis as a model system to study the regulation of cell death within an intact niche. This niche contains sperm-producing germline stem cells (GSCs) and accompanying somatic cyst stem cells (or CySCs). Although many signals are known to promote stem cell self-renewal in this tissue, including the highly conserved JAK-STAT pathway, the response of these stem cells to potential death-inducing signals, and factors promoting stem cell survival, have not been characterized...