Somatoendocrine disorders in nervous anorexia

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is expressed in the extremely stubborn desire to lose weight through targeted, long-term self-restraint in food, sometimes accompanied by intense physical exercise or taking large doses of a laxative. If it is impossible to withstand prolonged starvation, patients resort to a method such as inducing artificial vomiting. AN is a pathology characteristic of adolescent girls and young girls, although it can sometimes occur in males of puberty or adolescence. AN is more common at the age of 15-25 years. The incidence among women is on average 10 times higher than among men. There is no information on the prevalence of AN in our country. According to foreign authors, the frequency of AN is 112 per 100,000 of the population. However, these data are underestimated, since only patients with severe, protracted forms of the course of AN go to the hospital and are subject to accounting. Patients with "mild" forms of AN remain outside the field of vision of doctors. The beginning of a scientific study of AN was laid by W. Gull (1868) and E.-Ch. Laseque (1873). However, despite the increasing number of studies devoted to this interesting problem, AN still causes numerous discussions regarding its etiology, pathogenesis, and neuroendocrine disorders, and methods for their correction. In this review, we tried to summarize the available data of recent years. One of the first reviews on the nature of neuroendocrine shifts in AN was made in 1984.