The study so far
Welcome to our blog post.
You might have seen a lot of concern on the news for people’s mental health and wellbeing during this challenging time, and we have shared this concern. Our team includes world leading experts in the field of mental health, psychiatry and eating disorders and we have met to determine the kind of information that we would need to really support and protect people with mental health disorders.
If you have already been enrolled in this study, you present a very unique ability to help us understand how your ‘baseline’ characteristics (your responses during your study visit between 2018-2019) can help us understand any challenges that you face during the current time. This information will help us to identify other people with similar characteristics and know that they need help and support.
For this reason, if you haven’t already, please find the unique link that we sent you to invite you to participate in the STRATIFY-ESTRA Covid-19 survey. At the end of the Covid-19 situation, we will invite you to participate in another study day with us and you will be paid £100 again. Please do not hesitate to contact estra@kcl.ac.uk if you have any questions about this.
Recap: What is STRATIFY - ESTRA?
The aim of the STRATIFY - ESTRA study is to understand the relationship between Eating Disorders (EDs) and other mental health disorders. EDs include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and OSFED (other specified feeding or eating disorders). Sometimes, by treating people based on a single mental health diagnosis, other harmful symptoms and behaviours can go unnoticed. STRATIFY- ESTRA aims to measure a variety of symptoms, behaviours and the biological mechanisms behind them to give us a more holistic idea of EDs.
Why are we trying to understand EDs in this way?
Most psychiatric disorders arise as a result of an interplay between environmental developmental and social factors. The same theory applies to eating disorders. Through the ESTRA study we are trying to shed light on the complex nature of EDs by understanding the changes in brain structure and function and other measurable traits that occur before, during and after the onset of an eating disorder. Thus, the main focus of the ESTRA study is the two most-studied and established eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.
The study so far:
Phase-1
We began by recruiting 116 individuals suffering from EDs (AN and BN). The study began in 2018, recruiting 18 to 25 year old adults with either as either an ED participant or a healthy control. After the initial screening the recruited participants had to attend an assessment day. During the day of the assessment participants performed a variety of tasks, which investigated different biological processes, cognition, personality and life events leading up to an ED.
Data processing and analysis
When the first phase of recruiting participants with EDs was complete, our team spent a lot of time uploading your data onto a secure online server and removing any information that could be used to identify you in the future. Many of you kindly provided additional information at this stage if anything was missed on the day. This process means that when we analyse the dataset, we are confident in our findings.
What happens now?
1. Phase-2 & COVID-19 study
We have been awarded a second round of funding following the immense success of our baseline phase! We want to conduct a follow up study on our participants recruited in order to understand how eating disorders change over time. Given the current situation, we took the initiative to form an online questionnaire assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This questionnaire is tailor-made to fit your unique profile, based on the data you provided to the ESTRA study.
2. Recruiting recovered participants
There is very limited research available on individuals recovering from eating disorders. We want to further understand the pathway of recovery to a healthy relationship with food by identifying:
· brain changes that happen during recovery
· cognitive changes
· fluctuations on dominant personality traits
· any genetic factors contributing to the recovery
In the ESTRA study we believe that if we investigate recovery and understand it better, then we can know how to support those most in need.
Next steps
If you have a preferred date for your next institute assessment, we will be able to accommodate this as best we can. Please contact estra@kcl.ac.uk.
If you have any friends who might want to participate in the study as a recovered ED participant (recovered from AN or BN for 6 months or more), please ask them to contact estra@kcl.ac.uk to reserve their place in the study.