CHICAGO – It’s a good idea to look for eating disorders in young, athletic women who present with oligomenorrhea; they are at high risk for them and can be helped with estrogen replacement, especially with a patch, according to investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
Estrogen replacement will also help with stress fractures and other bone problems, but young, athletic women might resist the idea. They worry that it might hurt their performance and are often proud that they work out hard enough to stop their periods, according to investigator Vibha Singhal, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist and eating disorder specialist at the hospital.
M. Alexander Otto/MDedge News
Dr. Vibha Singha (left) and Dr. Franziska Plessow
Earlier research done at Massachusetts General had shown that replacing estrogen to physiological levels helped reduce anxiety and body dissatisfaction in anorexia nervosa. Both are key drivers of the condition, along with the drive for thinness, lead investigator Franziska Plessow, PhD, a neuroendocrine researcher at the hospital, said at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting.
But the researchers wondered whether estrogen also helps healthy weight women with nascent eating disorders, so the investigators turned to female athletes aged 14-25 years who had stopped menstruating or were about to.
The 117 oligomenorrheic athletes (OA) they investigated – none of whom had formally diagnosed eating disorders – scored significantly higher on measures of body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, perfectionism, and “cognitive restraint of eating,” compared with 50 female athletes and 41 nonathletic women, both with normal periods. For instance, OA women scored a mean of 4.21 on the drive for thinness scale of the Eating Disorder Inventory–2, a low score, but still significantly higher than the 1.66 points in eumenorrheic athletes and 1.61 points in nonathletes (P = .0005).
Oligomenorrheic female athletes “show more disordered eating behavior and psychopathology at the subclinical level,” Dr. Plessow said.