The insula is involved inprocessing taste, as well as the anticipation and reward of eating, andhas been implicated in studies of other driven behavioral disorders,including drug addiction and gambling.”īulimia nervosa is aserious eating disorder marked by a destructive pattern of recurrentdieting, binging and vomiting to control one's weight. He noted, "We foundthat mu-opioid receptor binding in bulimic women was lower than inhealthy women in the left insular cortex. PETis a powerful medical imaging procedure that noninvasively uses specialimaging systems and radioactive tracers to produce pictures of thefunction and metabolism of the cells in the body. James Frost, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology andneuroscience at Johns Hopkins and co-author of "Regional μ-OpioidReceptor Binding in Insular Cortex Is Decreased in Bulimia Nervosa andCorrelates Inversely With Fasting Behavior." In the study, eight womenwith bulimia were compared to healthy women of the same age and weight.Their brains were scanned using positron emission tomography (PET)after injection with the short-acting radioactive compound carfentanil,which binds to mu-opioid receptors in the brain, explained Frost.
Thefirst imaging study to implicate the opioid system in bulimia nervosashows differences in women with bulimia compared to healthy women,added J. "Involvementof the opioid system may explain the addictive quality of thisbehavioral disorder," said Angela Guarda, M.D., assistant professor ofpsychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md.