Eating Disorders Prevention: An Effectiveness Trial for At-Risk College Students

Oregon Research Institute

Status: Completed

Conditions: Eating Disorders; Obesity

Treatments: Behavioral: Body Project

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01126918

MH086582

Details and patient eligibility

About

This three-site effectiveness trial will test whether a brief dissonance-based eating disorder prevention program produces intervention effects when college counselors, psychologists, and nurses are responsible for participant recruitment, screening, and intervention delivery under ecologically valid conditions.

Full description

Threshold and subthreshold eating disorders affect over 10% of young women and are associated with functional impairment, distress, psychiatric comorbidity, medical complications, mortality, and risk for obesity onset. Accordingly, a pressing public healthy priority is to develop effective prevention programs for eating pathology. The proposed project will be the first effectiveness trial to test whether an eating disorder prevention program with strong empirical support from efficacy trials produces effects under ecologically valid conditions among high-risk female college students, which is a vital step toward widespread dissemination of programs developed with NIH funding. The proposed cost-effectiveness analyses and examination of process factors that predict larger intervention effects will also represent novel contributions to the literature.

Enrollment: 432 patients

Sex: Female

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• (1) is a registered student at a participating school, (2) self-reports body image concerns

Exclusion criteria

• meets DSM-IV criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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432 participants in 2 patient groups

Brochure Condition

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants in this condition receive an educational brochure about healthy body image via post-mail.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Body Project

Group Condition

Experimental group

Description:

Participants in this condition attend four 1-hour group meetings (one per week for four consecutive weeks) in which they complete a series of written and verbal exercises intended to increase body satisfaction.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Body Project