Introduction: Eating Disorders are often considered to be culture-bound syndromes, occurring mainly in industrialized Western countries. In the last decade several epidemiologic studies were published in Eastern European countries, indicating that eating disorders are wide-spread also in this region. The present paper is an epidemiological study of eating disorders in Romania and analyses the prevalence of eating disorders and some pathological eating behaviours in secondary school samples from Romania.
Methods: A total of 2,396 secondary school adolescents from Romania (1,140 male, 1,256 female) 1,312 Hungarians and 1,084 Romanians were surveyed.
Results: The prevalence of AN was 0.6% in the Romanian female population and no clinical cases of AN were found in the Hungarian female sample. As for subclinical AN, the rate in the Hungarian female sample was 0.4% and in the Romanian one 1.9%. The prevalence of BN was 1% in the Hungarian and 1.3% in the Romanian female sample. The prevalence of subclinical BN in the Hungarian female sample was 0.8% and for the Romanian female sample it was 0.7%. We did not find clinical or subclinical AN in the male sample but the prevalence of BN was 0.2% in the Hungarian male sample. The subclinical BN was 0.3% in the Hungarian male sample and 0.5% in the Romanian male sample.
Conclusions: The results stress the importance of eating disorders also in Romania. This may be due to the identification process with Western values.