Treatment for persons with eating disorder

Key message

The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services was commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate of Health to perform a systematic search for systematic reviews on psychosocial and medical interventions for persons with eating disorder, and sorting into medicinal treatment, cognitive therapy, family therapy, self help and outpatient treatment, for persons diagnosed according to anorexia, bulimic or binge eating disorder.

We developed a systematic literature search. We performed systematic searches in Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, Cinahl, SveMed+ and Cochrane Library June 2010. Three of the project team read and assessed title and abstracts independently and assessed relevance after predefined inclusion criteria.

The search identified 4269 articles. We included 41 reviews that were considered relevant after using predefined inclusion criteria, and sorted these references according to type of population and intervention. Abstracts of included reviews are presented in the appendix. We did not assess the methodological quality of the reviews, nor did we summarize or grade the evidence. We highly recommend using checklist to assess the quality of the reviews.

Our mapping of research publications showed the existing summarized research of medication and psychosocial treatment for persons with eating disorder. The reviews we refer to are not necessarily systematic or of high quality. These potential weaknesses show the need for thorough assessment. We strongly recommend a critical appraisal, before utilization of this evidence into practice.