The association between childhood maltreatment and eating disorder psychopathology: A mixed-model investigation

Background: Childhood maltreatment (CM) is recognized as a non-specific risk factor for Eating Disorders (EDs), but the mechanisms explaining this association have been insufficiently assessed. We aim to explore the psychological pathways through which CM experiences promote ED core symptoms.

Methods: Two-hundred-twenty-eight people with EDs, 94 with anorexia nervosa restricting (ANR) type and 134 with binge-purging (BP) symptoms (including 23 with AN purging type and 111 with bulimia nervosa), completed the Eating Disorder Inventory-2, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. The variables provided by these questionnaires were included in a network analysis to identify the shortest pathways between CM nodes and ED core symptoms. Then mediation analysis was performed in order to confirm the mediation role of the nodes included in the shortest pathways from CM to ED core symptoms.

Results: All types of CM experiences were connected to the ED psychopathology through emotional abuse. In the ANR group, interoceptive awareness was included in the shortest path between emotional abuse and drive to thinness and mediated this relationship. In the BP group, the shortest routes between CM and ED core symptoms included both ineffectiveness and interoceptive awareness.

Conclusions: Combining the network analysis approach with the mediation analyses provides for the first time a putative hybrid model, which reveals that all CM types converge towards ED symptoms through emotional abuse and that interoceptive awareness and ineffectiveness mediate these connections in people with ANR and BP symptoms, respectively. These findings may have possible implications for both research and treatment of EDs.