Objective: Little is known about biological factors that contribute to purging after normal amounts of food-the central feature of purging disorder (PD). This study comes from a series of nested studies examining ingestive behaviors in bulimic syndromes and specifically evaluated the satiety peptide YY (PYY) and the hunger peptide ghrelin in women with PD (n = 25), bulimia nervosa-purging (BNp) (n = 26), and controls (n = 26). Based on distinct subjective responses to a fixed meal in PD (Keel, Wolfe, Liddle, DeYoung, & Jimerson, ), we tested whether postprandial PYY response was significantly greater and ghrelin levels significantly lower in women with PD compared to controls and women with BNp.
Method: Participants completed structured clinical interviews, self-report questionnaires, and laboratory assessments of gut peptide and subjective responses to a fixed meal.
Results: Women with PD demonstrated a significantly greater postprandial PYY response compared to women with BNp and controls, who did not differ significantly. PD women also endorsed significantly greater gastrointestinal distress, and PYY predicted gastrointestinal intestinal distress. Ghrelin levels were significantly greater in PD and BNp compared to controls, but did not differ significantly between eating disorders. Women with BNp endorsed significantly greater postprandial hunger, and ghrelin predicted hunger.
Discussion: PD is associated with a unique disturbance in PYY response. Findings contribute to growing evidence of physiological distinctions between PD and BNp. Future research should examine whether these distinctions account for differences in clinical presentation as this could inform the development of specific interventions for patients with PD.
Keywords: bulimia nervosa; classification; gut peptides; physiology; purging disorder.
© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.