Psychiatrist wants South Australia to consider brain stimulation to treat eating disorders

Brain stimulation techniques — which can involve drilling holes in the skull — should be used to treat eating disorders, an SA psychiatrist says.

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A leading eating disorder specialist wants South Australia to use emerging brain stimulation techniques to treat the illness.

Psychiatrist Randall Long, who heads South Australia's Statewide Eating Disorder Service, will make the argument at an international conference in Adelaide on Friday.

Up to one million Australians have an eating disorder and the death rate for anorexia is among the highest of all mental disorders in young and middle-aged adults.

Dr Long said psychological therapies or medications were not always effective and health authorities should be investigating techniques such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation or deep brain stimulation surgery for more extreme cases.

The former technique sends magnetic impulses through the skull and is already being used to treat depression in Adelaide.

For the latter procedure, surgeons drill into the skull and place electrodes into the brain.

Dr Long said “very early trials” using deep brain stimulation on eating disorder patients were being conducted internationally.

The techniques could allow doctors to “strengthen systems (in the brain) that need to be stronger to recover or you can dull down overactive systems that are tormenting the patient with an eating disorder”, he said.

“We can actually now see that there are significant changes in the functioning of the brain of patients with eating disorders,” Dr Long said.

“We’re beginning to map those out and it really fights that stigma of an eating disorder as just a choice or a lifestyle.

“We’re getting the kind of evidence that this is in the brain, as with depression … or other mental illness.”

Dr Long conceded that brain stimulation treatments for eating disorders were “unapologetically future stuff” but called for more research into how they could best be used.

In SA, children as young as 11 and women weighing as little as 32kg have sought treatment for eating disorders.

The statewide service, based at the Flinders Medical Centre, and an outpatient centre at Brighton, are funded to treat people aged 15 and older. The State Government has pledged an extra $4 million to expand the service to cover more, younger children but the model is still being finalised.

The Federal Government has committed $5 million to a treatment centre to be built at the Repat Hospital site, which would offer live-in treatment and day support for patients aged 16 and older.

For support phone the Statewide Eating Disorder Service on 8198 0800 or the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 ED HOPE.