Comorbid Issues in Eating Disorders If a person visited their doctor and described the following symptoms, what would you determine their diagnosis to be? The woman is in her late teens and has had problems with eating for the past six months. When he eats he has to cut the food into very small pieces; these pieces are then counted and separated into healthy foods and foods that may not be as healthy on your plate. Once the foods are separated, he will not eat the unhealthy ones and will discard them. He then arranges the food in rows on his plate before starting to eat. Once he has eaten the food, he allows himself only 7 bites of each food, so as not to overdo it or stray from his established routine because he feels that something bad will happen if he exceeds this amount. He then proceeds to eat each piece separately, chewing each bite a hundred times. This routine is repeated for every meal throughout the day and must be done the same way each time. Once the meal is finished, which typically lasts several hours, he goes about his daily activities as he normally does and shows no other strange behavior. While it is obvious that the person described above has some problems with his or her eating behavior, what exactly is the nature of these problems? On the one hand, he may have an eating disorder. He cares meticulously about the amount of food he eats and the health value of every single morsel of food. She only allows herself to have a set number of bites and must chew them carefully for fear that if she exceeds this set amount or style something harmful will come to her. These behaviors are present only when he eats... in the center of the paper... regarding possible spectrum disorders: results of a family study. Biological Psychiatry, 48, 287-293.Cumella, Edward J. (1999). Obsessive-compulsive disorder with eating disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 982. Thornton, Christopher and Russell, Janice. (1997). Obsessive-compulsive comorbidity in eating disorders. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 21, 83-87. Thiel, Andreas, Zuger, Markus, Jacoby, Georg E. and Schualer, Gerhard. (1998). Thirty-month results in patients with anorexia or bulimia nervosa and concomitant obsessive-compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 155, 244-249. Von Ranson, K. M., Kaye, W. H., Weltzin, T. E., Radhika, R., & Matsunaga, H. (1999). Symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder before and after recovery from bulimia nervosa. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 1703-1708.