Hello,

I am a CBT therapist but I have no experience working with eating disorders and anorexia. I also work with children and young people, so I am answering this for that perspective. However, I imagine that it may be difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of individual components of treatment, i.e, cognitive or behavioural. For example, CBT for eating disorders generally has a mixture of cognitive and behavioural aspects built within the treatment programme, so it would be difficult to isolate the effectiveness of each component.

There is a CBT-E protocol for eating disorders, which is more of an enhanced CBT treatment approach for eating disorders, including anorexia. Generally, CBT-E demonstrates positive results for inpatient and community settings for adolescents, in comparison to traditional and less disorder specific CBT. If you wanted to gather a large quantity of data, NICE evidence search may be useful for you. I searched this earlier, but I cannot attach the link in this comment.

I hope this helps and I would be keen to follow any other replies!

All guidelines I am familiar with recommend Family Based Therapy for adolescents with anorexia nervosa. However, many guidelines in fact recommended cognitive-behavioral therapy as an individual treatment approach at some level because it intervenes at the symptom level and centers on the modification of dysfunctional behaviors and cognitions that maintain the disorder. It was recommended as a first-line psychotherapy for AN by guidelines in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. I'm attaching a few papers that may be of interest.

When I encounter serious eating d/o's it is very often a co-morbid presentation w/ personality conflicts. CBT for many d/o's is over rated in my clinical opinion.

Rich