The review, led by Alexandra Cussen of the University of Melbourne and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute together with colleagues including Michele Yeo, Janet Conti, Andrew Wallis and Phillipa Hay, followed the PRISMA reporting guidelines and was prospectively registered with PROSPERO. The team searched three major databases, APA PsycINFO, Embase and Web of Knowledge, covering publications from 2005 through to the fourth of August 2025, and supplemented the search with citation tracking. After removing duplicates from 1,794 identified records, the researchers applied strict inclusion criteria: studies in any language that examined adaptations to outpatient, manualised FBT for young people aged eighteen or under with anorexia nervosa or atypical anorexia nervosa. Quality was appraised using the Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tools, a standard framework for judging methodological rigour across diverse study designs.

The final evidence base comprised thirty-one papers, of which twenty-five were primary studies and six were secondary analyses, encompassing a total of 2,332 participants. Within that body of work the reviewers identified twenty-one distinct adaptations to FBT, which they organised into three broad categories. The first, add-ons, involved bolting supplementary components onto the standard protocol and appeared in thirteen studies; examples include cognitive remediation therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy skills, art therapy and guided self-help elements. The second category, in-model modifications or flexibility, described in nine studies, kept the FBT framework intact but altered how it was delivered, such as changing session frequency, separating the adolescent from parents during parts of treatment, or shifting the primary focus onto parents alone. The third category, adaptations beyond the FBT manual, appeared in six studies and involved more fundamental departures from the published protocol.

A central question driving the review was whether these modifications are grounded in what the field already knows about why young people drop out of treatment or fail to recover. The answer, in many cases, was no. Only eight of the included studies explicitly targeted a factor with established links to treatment non-response, such as high expressed emotion within the family, early non-response during the critical first weeks, low parental self-efficacy, or older adolescent age. The remaining adaptations were largely driven by clinical intuition, local service constraints or theoretical preference rather than by evidence about the mechanisms that derail recovery. For a field that has spent two decades building the case for FBT through randomised trials, the reviewers suggest, this disconnect between theory and modification practice represents a significant blind spot.

Methodological weaknesses compounded the problem. Fifteen of the thirty-one studies, roughly fifty-eight percent, had no comparator group at all, meaning that any improvement observed could not be attributed with confidence to the adaptation itself rather than to the passage of time, the natural course of the illness, or the underlying FBT framework. Sample sizes were frequently small, outcome measures varied widely from one study to the next, and few trials used the standardised remission definitions that would allow findings to be pooled or compared across research groups. The Joanna Briggs Institute appraisals reflected these limitations, with many studies scoring poorly on key quality criteria. In practical terms, the review found a literature that is rich in clinical creativity but poor in the controlled evidence needed to separate genuinely useful innovations from well-intentioned noise.

Against that backdrop, three adaptations stood out as showing preliminary evidence of benefit over standard FBT. The first is a separated treatment model, in which the therapist meets with the adolescent and the parents in separate sessions rather than conducting every session with the whole family together. This structure, exemplified by approaches such as Acceptance-based Separated Family Treatment, appears to ease the intense interpersonal pressure that can arise when weight restoration is negotiated in front of the patient, while still equipping parents to take charge of refeeding. The second promising adaptation is parent emotion-coaching, which trains caregivers to recognise, validate and help regulate their child’s emotional distress rather than focusing solely on eating behaviour, directly addressing the high expressed emotion that predicts poorer outcomes. The third is flexible or extended treatment duration, allowing the number and pacing of sessions to respond to how quickly a patient progresses instead of adhering to a fixed schedule.

The mechanistic logic behind these three winners is instructive. Separated models and emotion-coaching both target the emotional climate of the household, which decades of family research have identified as a modifiable predictor of outcome in adolescent anorexia. Extended duration, by contrast, addresses the temporal mismatch between a fixed treatment calendar and the highly variable pace of weight and psychological recovery, particularly for older adolescents or those presenting with atypical anorexia who may start treatment at a higher weight and therefore face different restoration trajectories. In each case the adaptation is not a random departure but a targeted response to a specific, evidence-linked barrier to recovery, which is precisely the approach the reviewers argue the field should take more systematically.

The authors are careful about what their findings can and cannot support. They conclude that while some promising adaptations exist, the evidence base remains limited by the predominance of small, uncontrolled studies and the absence of standardised outcome measures, and they call for adequately powered, controlled trials of the most promising modifications to demonstrate clear benefit over standard FBT before clinical practice changes wholesale. The research was funded by the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund under its Childhood Mental Health programme, with additional support from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. The team also disclosed several competing interests, including editorial roles held by some authors at the Journal of Eating Disorders and co-authorship of two of the included papers, transparency that matters when the review touches on a treatment model closely associated with several of the investigators.

For clinicians and families, the practical message is one of cautious optimism. FBT remains the treatment of first choice, and nothing in this review undermines that position. But for the roughly half of young patients who do not fully remit with standard care, the review suggests that clinicians are not simply guessing when they adjust the protocol: separated formats, emotion-focused parent coaching and flexible treatment length now carry the strongest preliminary signals of added benefit. For researchers, the message is sharper. The field has generated twenty-one ideas for improving a therapy that helps many but not all, and it now needs the large, controlled, consistently measured trials that can tell families which of those ideas genuinely work, turning two decades of clinical improvisation into a tested roadmap for better recovery rates in adolescent anorexia nervosa and atypical anorexia nervosa.

Subject of Research: Systematic review of adaptations to family-based treatment for children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa or atypical anorexia nervosa

Article Title: Treatment adaptations to family-based treatment for children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa or atypical anorexia nervosa, and their evidence-base: a systematic review

Article References: Cussen, A., Yeo, M., Conti, J., Alford, C., Donnelly, B., Jackman, B., Krug, I., Kushner, Y., McCormack, M., Rankin, R., Turner-Revach, M., Wallis, A., & Hay, P. (2026). Treatment adaptations to family-based treatment for children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa or atypical anorexia nervosa, and their evidence-base: a systematic review. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01776-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01776-7

Keywords: family-based treatment, anorexia nervosa, atypical anorexia nervosa, adolescent eating disorders, systematic review, treatment adaptation, psychotherapy, parent emotion-coaching, separated family treatment, treatment non-response, Journal of Eating Disorders, PRISMA

The stakes of the question are high. Untreated anorexia nervosa is life-threatening and disabling, carrying the second highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders, exceeded only by opioid use disorder, with deaths driven both by medical complications and by suicide. Lifetime prevalence reaches up to four percent among females and 0.3 percent among males, and incidence in adolescents appears to be rising. Roughly half of those affected have psychiatric comorbidity, and depression and high anxiety are linked to poor long-term prognosis. Although outpatient care, particularly family-based treatment, is the recommended first line for adolescents, the most severely ill patients, those with life-threatening weight loss, physiological instability or deterioration despite maximal outpatient efforts, often require inpatient admission, sometimes under Sweden’s Compulsory Psychiatric Care Act, which permits treatment without patient consent.

The researchers recruited participants from the child and adolescent psychiatric emergency unit at University Hospital in Malmö, the only such unit in a region of 1.4 million people, which maintains eight inpatient beds dedicated to severe eating disorders. Of 28 potentially eligible adolescents admitted between January 2021 and December 2023, seven agreed to participate. Their average stay had lasted 18 weeks, ranging from four to 38 weeks, six had experienced multiple treatment periods, and six had been admitted involuntarily, some more than once. On average they had been ill for about ten months before their first admission, and by the time they arrived they could no longer attend school or after-school activities. Interviews, averaging 90 minutes, took place 13 to 24 months after discharge, when all participants were stabilized and in full or partial remission.

The analysis followed three steps: a naïve reading of the transcripts, a structural analysis dividing the text into meaning units and themes, and a final comprehensive understanding discussed by the whole team. To guard against bias, the researchers explicitly discussed their pre-understanding of eating disorders and compulsory treatment, and two participants were invited to review and confirm the structural analysis, which both did. What emerged was a powerful central metaphor: the girls described existing in a power struggle, a battle zone with four distinct fronts. They were fighting, simultaneously, against the healthcare professionals, against the eating disorder itself, against fellow patients, and against their parents.

The battle with staff was the most visible front. Compulsory care for severe starvation involves surveillance, weight control and supervised meals, and the participants described feeling restricted, oppressed and stripped of all autonomy. Some recalled being threatened with feeding tubes and experiencing nutritional support as punishment rather than therapy. They reported mixed signals from staff about rules and restrictions, producing profound insecurity, and they felt mistrusted and monitored while eating. Most painfully, many described being approached as an eating disorder rather than as a person, feeling deprived of their human dignity, inherent value and responsibility for their own actions. One participant put it bluntly: care cannot fight the eating disorder, only she could, and for that she needed personalized treatment rather than a focus on pathology alone.

Uncertainty compounded the distress. The girls said staff did not always explain the rationale behind decisions, leaving them confused and lonely, and in retrospect they recognized that starvation itself had limited their cognitive capacity, deepening their despair. Some described suicidal thoughts during this period. Yet the analysis also identified a theme of surrendering, in which some participants came to accept that total autonomy was not an option while medically unstable, and a few even appreciated being disburdened from the pressure of managing the illness alone. This ambivalence, resentment of coercion alongside recognition of its necessity, runs through the entire study and captures the paradox clinicians face when treating patients who lack insight into their own condition.

The second front, the fight against the disorder itself, began in denial. Participants initially rejected the idea that they were sick and struggled to understand the condition. Staff encouraged them to view the anorexia as an external entity separate from the self, a technique known as externalization that is common in eating disorder treatment. But the girls experienced this dualistically: they felt simultaneously identical to the disorder and subjected to it, and when staff focused narrowly on weight, food intake and forced nutrition, the part that constituted their self went unconfirmed, producing a profound sense of fighting an entirely solitary battle. They endured acute somatic consequences such as hypoglycaemia, nausea and vomiting, and while they accepted somatic care as necessary, they wished staff would support their psychological fight rather than attempting to fight the disorder for them.

The two remaining fronts were quieter but no less corrosive. Among fellow patients, the girls described a silent war of constant observation, monitoring each other’s portions, movements around the ward and feeding tubes, comparisons that triggered panic and, disturbingly, normalized extreme thinness. At the same time they felt empathy and a kind of communion with peers in the same boat. The battle with parents was shaped by the unit’s structure: mothers, who were the primary accompanying caregivers in six of seven cases, slept in the same room, shared meals and participated in monitoring eating, producing situations filled with tension and conflict that eroded trust within the mother-daughter relationship. Fathers were largely absent, and the daughter-father dynamic was described as tense and distanced, suggesting the family, potentially the strongest resource for recovery, was drawn into an unnecessary battle of its own.

Despite the suffering described, the study’s comprehensive understanding is not a condemnation of compulsory care. Within six months to two years after discharge, all participants had become reconciled with the experience, recognizing that the involuntary hospital treatment had been a necessary turning point for their survival, even if the methods remained problematic. They recovered by eventually finding inner motivation and strength, and all had returned to school, friends and family activities. The authors argue that this reconciliation is possible precisely because clinicians can learn from the four-front framework: by acknowledging the power struggle openly with patients and families, confirming the patient’s suffering to restore dignity, strengthening parents to carry out family-based treatment components, and providing the psychological support and peer support that participants repeatedly requested, wards may be able to reduce iatrogenic harm without compromising medical safety.

The authors acknowledge limitations: only girls were included, limiting generalizability to male patients, and the sample was small, though the participant-driven interviews were extensive and the study was judged to have sufficient information power. Recall bias is also possible given the 13-to-24-month interval, although the authors considered this distance valuable for reflection. Methodologically, the study distinguishes the outside, professional perspective on disease from the inside, personal perspective, arguing both are valid and essential for person-centred care, which Swedish national guidelines mandate for all care processes including compulsory psychiatric treatment. The clinical significance of the findings lies in concrete implications for patient empowerment and counselling, psychosocial therapy, in-hospital guidance and the differing ways adolescents learn about their illness. For a disorder whose treatment demands cooperation from patients who cannot yet see why they need it, listening to the narrative and establishing a partnership, the essence of person-centred care, may be the difference between a battle zone and a turning point.

Subject of Research: Adolescents' lived experience of compulsory inpatient care for severe anorexia nervosa

Article Title: Existing in a Battle Zone – The Lived Experience of Adolescents Subjected to Hospital Compulsory Care Due to Severe Anorexia Nervosa

Article References: Henningsson, H., Forsberg, A., Eberhard, S., Johansson, B. A., & Rask, O. (2026). Existing in a Battle Zone – The Lived Experience of Adolescents Subjected to Hospital Compulsory Care Due to Severe Anorexia Nervosa. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02101-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02101-8

Keywords: anorexia nervosa, adolescents, compulsory care, inpatient treatment, eating disorders, qualitative research, phenomenological hermeneutics, person-centred care, psychiatry, family-based treatment, Sweden, mental health

Despite stabilizing weight and improving nutrition through family-based treatment, the girl deteriorated. Her functional decline was severe and progressive, and it did not track with her nutritional status. That mismatch, the Stanford team argues, should be a signal that clinicians cannot afford to ignore. She was eventually evaluated at an immune behavioral health clinic and diagnosed with pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, or PANS, a rare and heterogeneous condition that remains poorly understood at the intersection of child psychiatry, immunology, and eating disorder medicine.

PANS is defined clinically rather than by a biomarker. It is characterized by an abrupt, dramatic onset of obsessions, compulsions, and/or food restriction, accompanied by at least two additional acute-onset neuropsychiatric symptoms, which can range from anxiety and emotional lability to irritability, aggression, developmental regression, deterioration in school performance, sensory or motor abnormalities, and sleep disturbance. The key word is acute: symptoms appear seemingly overnight, in a way that is qualitatively different from the gradual unfolding of typical psychiatric illness. The syndrome sits within a broader family of post-infectious and immune-mediated neuropsychiatric conditions, and its diagnosis is currently exclusionary, meaning clinicians must rule out better-established disorders before attributing symptoms to PANS.

That exclusionary status creates a diagnostic trap. The core symptoms of PANS overlap heavily with obsessive-compulsive disorder, tic disorders, and eating disorders, all of which are common and well-characterized in children. A child who suddenly stops eating and develops obsessive fears around food can look indistinguishable from a child with early anorexia nervosa, particularly when body image concerns are present. The Stanford case is notable precisely because the girl did show body image disturbance and fear of weight gain, features that are not typically emphasized in PANS-related food restriction, which is more often described as driven by contamination fears, choking phobias, or sensory aversions rather than by weight and shape concerns.

The treatment trajectory in the case illustrates why the distinction matters. Family-based treatment, which empowers parents to restore their child’s weight through structured, supportive meals, is highly effective for many children with atypical anorexia nervosa, and indeed this patient did achieve weight stabilization and nutritional improvement. But PANS is thought to involve immune and inflammatory mechanisms, and neuropsychiatric symptoms driven by those processes are not expected to remit with refeeding alone. When a child continues to decline functionally despite adequate nutrition and evidence-based eating disorder care, the case report suggests, clinicians should widen their differential rather than assume the eating disorder is simply treatment-resistant.

The Stanford authors propose a set of clinical red flags that might prompt eating disorder specialists to consider PANS: a combination of acutely onset restrictive eating, body image disturbance occurring before puberty, and progressive functional impairment or developmental regression despite weight restoration. Each element is significant. Acute onset distinguishes PANS from the insidious course typical of anorexia nervosa. Prepubertal body image disturbance is unusual, since weight and shape concerns classically intensify with pubertal development. And failure to improve, or outright regression, after nutritional restoration runs counter to the expected course of a primary eating disorder, in which renourishment typically produces marked cognitive and behavioral improvement.

Management of the girl’s care ultimately required a carefully staged transition. She moved from the eating disorder clinic, where family-based treatment had addressed the atypical anorexia nervosa, to an immune behavioral health clinic and a sleep clinic, which together managed the remaining neuropsychiatric symptoms of PANS. The handoff was gradual rather than abrupt, reflecting the reality that many patients with overlapping presentations need both nutritional rehabilitation and immune-informed psychiatric care simultaneously. The authors highlight this coordination as a central lesson: specialty clinics are organized around diagnoses, but patients do not always respect those boundaries, and triage across clinics can determine whether a child receives the right treatment at the right time.

The broader scientific context remains contested. PANS, and its post-infectious predecessor concept PANDAS, or pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infection, have been debated within child psychiatry for decades. Proponents point to clinical clusters of sudden-onset symptoms, sometimes following infections, and to emerging work on immune markers and basal ganglia involvement. Skeptics note the absence of a validated biomarker, the heterogeneity of presentations, and the risk of mislabeling ordinary psychiatric illness as an immune condition. Case reports like this one occupy an important middle ground: they do not settle the underlying immunology, but they document real clinical trajectories and give other clinicians concrete patterns to watch for.

What makes this case particularly striking is the body image component. Food restriction in PANS has most often been framed as a fear-based or sensory-driven phenomenon, distinct from the weight and shape preoccupation that defines anorexia nervosa. A child with PANS features who also expresses fear of weight gain challenges that tidy separation and suggests that the two conditions may coexist, or that immune-driven neuropsychiatric illness can generate eating-disorder-like cognitions in some children. Either possibility has implications for assessment: eating disorder clinicians may need to probe more systematically for acute onset, accompanying neuropsychiatric symptoms, and developmental regression when evaluating young, prepubertal patients with restrictive eating.

The Stanford team, led by Megan M. Ruiz Fischer with colleagues including Jennifer L. Derenne, Melissa A. Silverman, Anne Claire Grammer, and Brittany Matheson, is careful to frame the report as a starting point rather than a conclusion. A single case cannot establish prevalence, causation, or treatment guidelines, and the authors note that little is known about the crossover between eating disorders and PANS, with minimal existing guidance on diagnostic and treatment considerations for these patients. But the report adds a concrete, well-documented example to a sparse literature, and its practical message is likely to resonate far beyond eating disorder specialty centers: when a child’s trajectory defies expectations, when nutrition improves but the child keeps slipping, the diagnosis on the chart may be incomplete. For families navigating the frightening territory of sudden psychiatric change in a young child, that message, that deterioration despite treatment deserves a fresh diagnostic look rather than blame or resignation, may be the most important takeaway of all.

Subject of Research: Diagnostic overlap between atypical anorexia nervosa and pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome (PANS) in children

Article Title: Anorexia nervosa or pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome? A case report

Article References: Ruiz Fischer, M. M., Derenne, J. L., Silverman, M. A., Grammer, A. C., & Matheson, B. (2026). Anorexia nervosa or pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome? A case report. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01783-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01783-8

Keywords: PANS, pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, anorexia nervosa, atypical anorexia nervosa, eating disorders, family-based treatment, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, food restriction, child psychiatry, immune-mediated neuropsychiatric illness, case report, diagnostic overlap

The study was led by Renee D. Rienecke of the Eating Disorders Education Institute in Miami and Northwestern University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, together with colleagues at the University of Calgary, Nova Southeastern University, and Galen Hope. The research team included clinicians, academic researchers, and individuals with lived experience of an eating disorder, a composition the authors viewed as critical. Training curricula have historically been designed largely by and for specialists, often leaving out the perspectives of patients and families who navigate the treatment system firsthand. By weighting the judgments of all three groups equally in a formal consensus process, the study sought to build a curriculum that reflects the realities of care rather than the preferences of any single professional community.

The Delphi method, the technique at the heart of the study, is a well-established approach for building consensus among experts who never meet face to face. Participants rate a series of statements independently, the results are aggregated and fed back to the group, and the rating process repeats until stability emerges. This design minimizes the influence of dominant personalities and institutional hierarchies that can distort in-person consensus meetings. In this study, the panel worked through 124 candidate items in the first round, rating each on a five-point scale of importance for inclusion in an introductory course. Predefined quantitative thresholds determined whether an item was endorsed, rejected, or sent forward for re-rating, and participants could also propose topics the researchers had not thought to include.

Those write-in options proved to be one of the study’s most revealing features. Content analysis of the free-text suggestions generated new categories and items that the original item pool had overlooked, including a cluster the researchers labeled myths, misconceptions, and stereotypes about eating disorders. That addition underscores a persistent problem in the field: eating disorders are still widely mischaracterized as illnesses of affluent young women, as vanity-driven choices, or as attention-seeking behaviors, misconceptions that delay diagnosis and discourage help-seeking across demographics. Panelists evidently judged that dismantling these stereotypes belongs at the very beginning of training, before any discussion of diagnostic criteria or treatment technique.

The quantitative results traced a clear arc across the three rounds. In round one, 49 of the 124 items met the endorsement threshold while 41 were rejected outright, with the remainder held for further evaluation. Round two added 25 more endorsed items and 10 more rejections, and the final round contributed 11 additional endorsements and 21 rejections, bringing the totals to 85 endorsed and 72 rejected items. The re-rating rounds were not merely mechanical: in round three, participants received feedback on how the full panel had rated each item in the previous round, allowing them to calibrate their own judgments against the collective view. This iterative feedback loop is precisely what gives the Delphi method its power to converge on genuine group consensus rather than averaging isolated opinions.

Perhaps the most striking single finding concerned treatment modalities. Of 20 treatment approaches or components presented to the panel, only two survived the consensus process: family-based treatment, often abbreviated FBT, and psychoeducation. Family-based treatment is an evidence-based approach in which parents are empowered to take a central role in restoring their adolescent’s nutrition and weight, and it has accumulated strong empirical support for adolescent anorexia nervosa in particular. Psychoeducation, the systematic teaching of patients and families about the nature, mechanisms, and course of eating disorders, is a component woven through nearly every credible treatment model. That the panel endorsed only these two from a list that implicitly included modalities such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, enhanced cognitive-behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy is a deliberate signal about scope: an introductory course, the panel concluded, should teach trainees to recognize these specialized therapies and understand when to refer, not attempt to train novice learners to deliver them.

This distinction between awareness and competence carries real clinical weight. Eating disorders frequently present first in primary care, pediatrics, dentistry, school counseling, and emergency settings, where professionals may have received only hours of relevant education during their entire training. The diagnostic signs can be subtle, including changes in weight or growth curves, ritualized eating, excessive exercise, electrolyte abnormalities, and enamel erosion, and the illnesses themselves are marked by secrecy and minimization. A trainee who has absorbed a well-constructed introductory curriculum can screen effectively, avoid stigmatizing language, initiate a medical risk assessment, and make a timely referral to specialist care. A trainee who has not may miss the illness entirely or, worse, deliver well-intentioned advice that exacerbates it. The consensus list effectively defines the floor of knowledge every such frontline professional should possess.

The study’s methods also reflect contemporary standards for consensus research. Quantitative decisions about endorsement and rejection were governed by criteria fixed in advance, protecting the results from post hoc judgment calls, while the qualitative analysis of write-in items followed structured content-analysis procedures before those items entered the second round. The research received ethics approval from the Biomedical Research Alliance of New York Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent. The work was funded by the Eating Disorders Education Institute, and the authors declared no competing interests. Published as open access, the full item-level results are available to educators, professional societies, and training programs that wish to build on them.

The international context sharpens the significance of the findings. Bodies such as the Australia and New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders have moved further than their American counterparts in codifying expectations for eating disorder competency among clinicians, and workforce documents in the United Kingdom have similarly articulated core capabilities. The United States, by contrast, has had no widely agreed-upon guideline for what introductory eating disorder education should contain, leaving curriculum design to individual institutions and instructors with predictably uneven results. A consensus-derived topic list of 85 items gives American educators, and educators elsewhere, an evidence-informed starting point that can be adapted for medical students, nursing curricula, psychology internships, dietetic programs, social work training, and continuing education for practicing clinicians.

The authors are candid that the list is a foundation rather than a finished curriculum. Endorsement by a Delphi panel establishes that a topic matters; it does not specify how deeply each topic should be taught, in what sequence, or with what pedagogical methods, and the panel’s conclusions describe an introductory course rather than advanced specialist training. Future work will need to translate the 85 endorsed topics into actual course content, evaluate learning outcomes, and test whether graduates of such courses demonstrably improve detection and referral of eating disorders in real clinical settings. Still, the study resolves a deceptively simple question that the field had never systematically answered: what must every newcomer to this area know? With a diverse panel of clinicians, researchers, and people with lived experience now on record, the answer no longer depends on who happens to be designing the syllabus. For a field in which early intervention measurably improves outcomes, a shared, expert-validated map of essential knowledge may prove to be one of the most consequential educational tools the eating disorders community has produced.

Subject of Research: Expert consensus on essential topics for an introductory training course on identifying and treating eating disorders

Article Title: Identifying Essential Topics for an Introductory Training Course on Eating Disorders:

Article References: Rienecke, R. D., Borkenhagen, D., Carde, B., Dimitropoulos, G., Singh, M., Mensinger, J., Turner, C., & Oliver-Pyatt, W. (2026). Identifying Essential Topics for an Introductory Training Course on Eating Disorders:. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01758-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01758-9

Keywords: eating disorders, Delphi study, training curriculum, family-based treatment, psychoeducation, consensus methods, clinician education, anorexia nervosa, lived experience, medical education, early intervention, stigma