Food Addiction and Binge Eating Disorder are Linked to Shared and Unique Deficits in Emotion Regulation among Female Seeking Bariatric Surgery

Abstract

Abstract Background: Dysfunctional eating patterns can indicate obesity psychopathologies. With food addiction (FA) becoming a clinically important problem, it's necessary to compare it to, especially Binge eating disorder (BED) in the obesity spectrum. The current study aimed to identify overlapping and distinctive features in emotion dysregulation as an underlying mechanism and emotional eating as a clinical feature among four groups of female with obesity seeking bariatric surgery: those with FA only (n = 35), BED only (n = 35), FA+BED (n = 31), and a control group with obesity only (n = 27). Methods: Data on emotion dysregulation and emotional eating were derived from the total 128 Females seeking bariatric surgery (mean age: 38.91 ± 10.59, mean BMI: 42.10 kg/m2 ± 4.43), using well-established measures. Univariate analyses of variance were used to compare these groups to one another (ANOVA). Results: Regarding descriptive statistics, the comorbid group with FA and BED showed higher scores on all measures, while the obesity only group acquired the lowest scores. Several ANOVA with Bonferroni test revealed that there were few differences among obesity with FA and obesity with BED. However, obesity only group was significantly better in terms of emotion dysregulation and emotional eating. Conclusions: Current research reveals that BED and FA are connected to both common and unique impairments in emotion regulation among bariatric surgery candidates. These findings may be helpful to provide more tailored treatment and enhance their outcomes after bariatric surgery. To differentiate between FA and BED in longer-term studies, however, more research is necessary.