Eating Disorders Prevention: An Effectiveness Trial for At-Risk College Students

Eating Disorders Prevention: An Effectiveness Trial for At-Risk College Students

This three-site effectiveness trial will test whether a brief dissonance-based eating disorder prevention program produces intervention effects when college counselors, psychologists, and nurses are responsible for participant recruitment, screening, and intervention delivery under ecologically valid conditions.

Threshold and subthreshold eating disorders affect over 10% of young women and are associated with functional impairment, distress, psychiatric comorbidity, medical complications, mortality, and risk for obesity onset. Accordingly, a pressing public healthy priority is to develop effective prevention programs for eating pathology. The proposed project will be the first effectiveness trial to test whether an eating disorder prevention program with strong empirical support from efficacy trials produces effects under ecologically valid conditions among high-risk female college students, which is a vital step toward widespread dissemination of programs developed with NIH funding. The proposed cost-effectiveness analyses and examination of process factors that predict larger intervention effects will also represent novel contributions to the literature.

Inclusion Criteria:

• (1) is a registered student at a participating school, (2) self-reports body image concerns

Exclusion Criteria:

• meets DSM-IV criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder