Remission Factors in Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a complex and multifactorial psychiatric disease that affects mostly women and is characterized by a self-restriction of food intake leading to life-threatening consequences whose underlying mechanisms are largely unexplored. AN encompasses a constellation of risk factors including genetic, biological, neuro-psychological and social factors. Although AN has a prevalence of only 1-3% in the general population, it has the highest mortality rate amongst any psychiatric disorder. Recovery of normal feeding behaviour in patients often requires several months with a large between-patient variability and a high percentage of relapse, which can occur in 35 to 41% of the patients. There is a huge unmet need for optimal understanding of processes underlying relapse. Reward processing abnormalities represents an important hypothesis underlying AN development and perpetuatio