Missing self-harm in girls with eating disorders

Teenagers with eating disorders could also be cutting themselves. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine studied 1,432 eating-disorder patients, aged between 10 and 21, who were admitted to the hospital's eating-disorder programme between 1997 and 2008. They found that 40.8% of them were physically harming themselves. The average age of those who engaged in self-harm was 16, many of them had a history of bingeing and purging and 85.2% of them cut themselves. However, less than half of the girls' medical records showed that they had been asked about self-harm indicating that elsewhere a number of patients with eating disorders could go without this aspect of their behaviour being picked up.