Living with someone with an eating disorder: factors affecting the caregivers' burden.

We focused on carers of subjects suffering from eating disorders (ED), and studied the characteristics that mostly expose them to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and expressed emotion, favoring the accommodation of the family system to the cared person. We administered the accommodation and enabling scale for eating disorders (AESED) questionnaire, the family questionnaire (FQ) and the depression, anxiety and stress scale (DASS-21) questionnaire to 97 carers of 62 ED patients, and investigated the carer's characteristics associated with the scores in the three questionnaires. A personal history of ED, being the primary carer, and caring for a person with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa are the characteristics that contribute most to aggravate the carers' burden in terms of stress, anxiety, depression, accommodation and enabling. Our findings may help doctors to provide effective support to caregivers and eventually improve the treatment of subjects with ED.

A study on the Italian validation of the family questionnaire.

Expressed Emotion (EE) refers to the emotional behavior and patterns of communication of relatives toward patients, and it is a strong predictor of illness outcome across a variety of psychiatric disorders. The aims of the present study were to provide a contribution for the Italian validation of the Family Questionnaire (FQ), developed by Wiedemann et al. (2002). The FQ is a self-report questionnaire to assess the EE construct. Specifically, the present study aims to examine the psychometric properties (factorial structure, internal consistency and concurrent validity) of the Italian version of the FQ and to explore the differences between mothers' and fathers' emotional responses to patients with eating disorders. The sample was composed of 199 carers of patients with eating disorders (80 males and 119 females, M age = 49.63, SD = 6.24). Confirmatory Factor Analyses verified the original two-factor structure. The internal consistency coefficients of the two FQ dimensions were satisfactory. Further, the present study provided support for the concurrent validity of FQ, also within the Italian context.