Emerging Adults Seeking Treatment for Their Eating Disorder: An Empirical Look at Young Adults Relative to Adults Over 25
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: Emerging adults (EAs), aged 18-25, may have distinct characteristics and, therefore, treatment needs compared to adults over 25 (adults > 25) that are poorly understood. OBJECTIVE: This study compares EAs to adults > 25 entering eating disorder (ED) treatment to better characterise their differences. METHOD: Participants were 623 individuals (332 EAs; 291 adults > 25) with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or related OSFED, referred to outpatient ED treatment from 2004-2020. Using retrospective demographic data, assessment information, and treatment attendance, EAs were compared to adults > 25 on: demographic characteristics, high-risk behaviours, diagnostic profiles, substance use, and treatment engagement. EAs with and without prior ED treatment were compared. RESULTS: Over half (55%) of EAs report living with family versus 14% of adults > 25. EAs reported more self-harm, ED-related theft, and greater cannabis use than adults > 25. While there were no differences in rates of comorbidity, EAs were less likely to have received treatment for comorbid illnesses. EAs without previous ED treatment were also more likely to disengage from treatment than those with prior treatment. CONCLUSIONS: EAs and adults > 25 demonstrate similar diagnostic profiles and rates of treatment drop-out. However, EAs may need individualised treatment planning for high-risk behaviours and comorbid illnesses. Recommendations for the care of EAs in adult programs are made.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".