New York -- Eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia are marked by an extreme fear of gaining weight and a disturbed perception of body shape and size. New research suggests that patients with these disorders also tend to be unhappy with other features of their body that have nothing to do with weight.

　"Our preliminary findings suggest that dissatisfaction with nonweight-related body image attributes may be indicative of greater weight-related body image problems and may represent a more unfavorable prognosis in eating disorders," report Drs. Madhulika A. Gupta and Andrew M. Johnson of the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

　The researchers studied 53 women with anorexia and/or bulimia and 73 women without eating disorders to see if the two groups differed in their feelings about nonweight-related features such as skin, teeth, jaw, nose, eyes, ears, hair and height. All the women were under age 40.

　In addition to answering questions about their satisfaction with these features, the women completed an eating disorders questionnaire. As expected, the group with eating disorders had significantly different scores on this questionnaire than women without these disorders, showing high levels of body dissatisfaction and preoccupation with thinness.

　The women with eating disorders were more dissatisfied with all of the nonweight-related items than women without eating disorders. In addition, there was a strong relationship between scores on the eating disorders questionnaire and scores measuring dissatisfaction with these other attributes.

　Experts have been unsure whether women with eating disorders who also express distorted views of other body parts have an additional illness that needs to be treated, or whether this is part of the overall eating disorder, the authors note.

　Writing in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, Gupta and Johnson conclude that dissatisfaction with nonweight-related parts of the body is part of anorexia and bulimia. This fits in, they say, with previous research showing that the best predictor of successful treatment in eating disorders is not actually eating behavior, but the degree of body image disturbance