Alexithymia, Resilience, and Depression in Functional Impairment among Adolescents with Eating Disorders: A Case-Control Study—Graphical Abstract

The research team consisted of Yavuz Meral, Saliha Açıkgöz, Alperen Bıkmazer, Büşra Arslan, Oğuzhan Koyuncu, Melike Ayşegül Kara Karaman, and Vahdet Görmez. The article was published in Alpha Psychiatry, Volume 27, Issue 1.

This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by reframing the clinical assessment of adolescent eating disorders beyond the traditional axes of symptom severity and diagnosis. Instead, it foregrounds everyday functioning—parent-reported, multidimensional impairment—and its associations with transdiagnostic determinants such as affect processing (alexithymia) and psychological resilience. By modeling functional outcomes in relation to alexithymia subdimensions and depressive symptoms, this approach offers a clinically actionable conceptual roadmap. Briefly, the findings indicate marked functional impairment in the eating disorder cohort, alongside higher alexithymia and internalizing symptom levels and lower resilience compared with controls. Furthermore, the results identify difficulty describing feelings as a key discriminator of group status and suggest that functional impairment is strongly associated with depressive symptomatology.

Overall, this framework provides a robust basis for future work on early risk identification, functioning-oriented monitoring, and the integration of interventions targeting emotion awareness and depressive symptoms into personalized treatment algorithms.

Read the article:
Alexithymia, Resilience, and Depression in Functional Impairment Among Adolescents With Eating Disorders: A Case-Control Study: https://www.imrpress.com/journal/AP/27/1/10.31083/AP45458

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