Some interesting research reported here, suggesting a genetic link between autism and anorexia:
At the Eating Disorders Unit at the Maudsley Hospital in London, anorexia is not seen as a social disorder — or even primarily a psychological one. While most American treatment providers blame perfection-seeking parents and the media's idealization of hollow-cheeked actresses for eating disorders (among other dysfunctional behaviors), researchers at Maudsley believe the root cause has little to do with social pressure. Rather, they think anorexia is better explained by heredity — perhaps by some of the same genes associated with autism….
"Both autism-spectrum conditions and anorexia share a narrow focus of attention, a resistance to change and excellent attention to detail," says Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, who is not involved in the Maudsley research.
In addition, says Janet Treasure, director of the Maudsley Eating Disorders Unit, past research suggests that about 15% to 20% of patients with anorexia may also have Asperger's syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder. Research also shows that the conditions occur together in families more often than they would by chance. It's possible, she says, that the same genetic predisposition for autism and anorexia may be expressed differently depending on gender.
About 15 times as many boys are given a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome as are girls, and nearly 10 times as many girls develop anorexia as boys. It's easy to see how an outsized sense of perfectionism in a female might lead to an unhealthy obsession with thinness — given society's preoccupation with physical appearance — while a male might end up obsessing about cars or trains, which is typical in autistic boys. "The reason [Asperger's] is usually diagnosed less often in females may be because it takes a different form — anorexia may be just one of the forms," says Baron-Cohen, adding that there are likely multiple routes leading to anorexia and that autistic features may not factor in all of them.
Interestingly the most successful treatment for anorexia now focuses not on the supposed dysfunctional family environment, or social pressure in the shape of ultra-thin models, but on a more basic regime of behaviour modification:
In the late 1980s, the British researchers published the earliest studies describing what has become known as the Maudsley method of treating anorexia in teens — and it remains the only therapy that has proved effective in controlled trials. Unlike traditional treatment, which assumes that anorexia is caused by environmental factors and low self-esteem and often involves intense therapy at residential treatment centers, the outpatient Maudsley method does not focus on psychological therapies or on "parent-ectomy" — removing the teen from the home.
Instead, researchers encourage patients and families to regard food as medicine, and caregivers are instructed to use rewards and positive pressure to restore patients' weight.
It's the same shift in emphasis that happened in autism studies when Bruno Bettelheim's refrigerator mother theory was finally discarded – after countless parents had been unjustly and cruelly blamed for their children's problems. Or, more generally, it's another move away from the psychoanalytically-derived view of socially-constructed problems – where the therapist-as-hero can claim the moral high ground as they berate society in general, and parents in particular, for the sins of the modern world – towards an appreciation of the underlying genetic predispositions involved, and the less dramatic but more realistic efforts to actually do something to help the poor sufferers.
Mick Hartley 
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