What relationship between eating disorders and alexithymia among medical students?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The student population seems to be vulnerable to eating disorders (ED) but is this in relation to their ability to express their emotions or alexithymia? Objectives Studying the prevalence of ED and alexithymia among medical students, and establish the relationship between these entities. Methods It was a cross-sectional study of 97 students in Sfax University Medicine (Tunisia). We used: – a questionnaire containing demographic and clinical data; – Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26): a score ≥ 20 indicates ED; – Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20): a score ≥ 61 indicates alexithymia. Results The average age of participants was 24.07 years (± 2.71); the sex ratio (M/W) was 0.4. Their average BMI was 22.85 kg/m 2 (± 3.36). They were smoking in 36.1% and sedentary in 43.3% of case. They had a nibbling activity in 57.7%. The average score of the EAT-26 was 11.66 ± 8.66 and prevalence of TCA was 19.6%. The average score of TAS-20 was 50.92, 0.46 and alexithymia was found in 16.5% of students. ED was significantly correlated with nibbling ( P = 0.02), BMI or overweight ( P = 0.012), smoking ( P = 0.006) and physical inactivity ( P < 0.00). Also alexithymia was significantly correlated with smoking ( P = 0.003) and physical inactivity ( P = 0.025). A significant correlation was found between alexithymia and ED ( P = 0.008). Conclusion It is clear from our study an association between alexithymia and the ED. Psychological support aimed specifically alexithymic dimension is indispensable, not only for decreasing the emergence of ED but also contributing to lower any addictive behavior. Disclosure of interest The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".