Alexithymia and cortisol awakening response in people with eating disorders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Alexithymia, that is the inability to recognize and describe one’s own emotions, is a transdiagnostic feature across eating disorders (EDs) and it has been associated to a prolonged stress exposure. Objectives Therefore, we evaluated whether alexithymia affects the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN). Methods Twenty-six women with AN and 26 with BN participated in the study. Alexithymia was evaluated by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale–20 and eating-related psychopathology was measured by the Eating Disorder Inventory-2. The activity of the HPA axis was assessed by the salivary cortisol awakening response (CAR). Group differences in saliva CAR were tested by repeated measures 3-way ANOVA with diagnosis and alexithymia as between-subject factors. Results The prevalence of alexithymia did not differ significantly between the two diagnostic groups (c 2 =1.24, p=0.26). Alexithymia was associated with more severe eating-related psychopathology in AN women but not in BN women. A significant reduction in the magnitude of CAR occurred in alexithymic patients with BN compared to non-alexithymic patients with BN (t = 3.39, p = 0.008), but not in alexithymic women with AN (t = 0.67, p = 0.54). Conclusions These results confirm the presence of a more severe eating-related psychopathology in alexithymic individuals with AN and show, for the first time, an association between alexithymia and a dampened basal activity of the HPA axis in BN. Disclosure No significant relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".