Cue exposure to food plus response prevention of binges for bulimia: A pilot study
✍ Scribed by Schmidt, Ulrike ;Marks, Isaac
- Publisher
- Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 563 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0276-3478
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In a single-case multiple-baseline design, 4 chronic bulimics had 12 sessions (3 per week) of therapist-aided cue exposure to food while resisting the temptation to binge that ensued. Two patients improved markedly during treatment. A third patient improved mainly after, not during, treatment. The fourth patient had a strong within-session response decrement, and showed some improvement by session 9, but then dropped out. These preliminary results warrant a larger controlled trial of cue exposure and response prevention of binging as an adjuvant in the management of bulimia.
Most treatment reports of bulimia nervosa use packages of cognitive and behavioral methods (Fairburn, 1981; Lacey, 1983; Leitenberg, Gross, Peterson, & Rosen, 1984; Schneider & Agras , 1985). The efficacy of individual treatment components has not been systematically investigated, however. It is also not known whether outcome is better when treatment emphasizes control of binges or of vomiting.
Rosen and Leitenberg (1982) and Leitenberg et al. (1984) claim that vomiting drives binging rather than vice versa and that the best way to treat bulimia is to deal with the vomiting. They argue that vomiting in bulimia reduces anxiety in the same way that handwashing and checking rituals do in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Their two pilot-studies, in one and five patients respectively, found that exposure and response prevention of vomiting (ERPV) together with cognitive restructuring led to reduction of vomiting and of binges. Giles, Young, and Young (1985) and Wilson, Rossiter, Kleifield, and Lindholm (1986) support the usefulness of this approach, whereas Johnson, Schlundt, Kelley,