Screening disordered eating attitudes and eating disorders in a sample of Turkish female college students

It has been hypothesized that college women are particularly susceptible to the development and maintenance of disturbed eating behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency of disordered eating attitudes and eating disorders in a sample of Turkish female college students. The Eating Attitudes Test was administered to a sample of 414 female college students. The subjects who had a score of 30 or higher were accepted as having disordered eating attitudes, and all of them have been examined using the Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition for eating disorders. Of the overall sample, 17.1% of subjects were classified as having disordered eating attitudes. This subgroup of subjects was then compared with the remainder on all the other measures. The differences between students with disordered eating attitudes and those without on sociodemographic variables (except for age) were not statistically significant. The rate was 1% for eating disorders including anorexia nervosa (0.5%) and bulimia nervosa (0.5%). This study suggested that the prevalences of disordered eating attitudes and anorexia nervosa among female college students in Turkey were similar to those found in Western societies, but the rate for bulimia nervosa was lower compared with Western societies.