How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity

How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity By Maia Szalavitz Tuesday, Jan. 05, 2010

Felitti wondered if there was something similar barring weight loss in other patients - or causing obesity itself. In the late '80s, he began a systematic study of 286 obese people, and discovered that 50% had been sexually abused as children. That rate is more than 50% higher than the rate normally reported by women, and more than triple the average rate in men. Indeed, the average rates of sexual abuse are themselves unsettling: according to a large 2003 study conducted by John Briere and Diana Elliott of the University of Southern California, 14% of men and 32% of women said they were molested at least once as children.

In recent years, studies by both Felitti and others have largely confirmed the association between sexual abuse - as well as other types of traumatic childhood experience - and eating disorders or obesity. A 2007 study of more than 11,000 California women found that those who had been abused as children were 27% more likely to be obese as adults, compared with those who had not, after adjusting for other factors. A 2009 study of more than 15,000 adolescents found that sexual abuse in childhood raised the risk of obesity 66% in males in adulthood. That study found no such effect in women, but did find a higher risk of eating disorders in sexually abused girls.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951240,00.html