Patients suffering from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa can actually lose brain volume, but new study puts forward that, with particular treatment, adult patients can recover the gray matter that they lost from persistent dieting.

Anorexia nervosa wreaks havoc on many different parts of the body, as well as the brain, study author Christina Roberto, of Yale University, said in a news release. In their research, they calculated brain volume deficits among underweight patients with the disease to evaluate if the decline is reversible through short-term weight restoration.

Working out of the Columbia University Center for Eating Disorders in New York City, Roberto and her colleagues conducted MRI scans of the brains of 32 adult female inpatients diagnosed with anorexia, as well as 21 healthy women.

Anorexia patients were found to have less brain volume than healthy women, and those how had battled the psychiatric disorder the longest had the furthermost gray volume deficit.

Roberto said that the good news is that when women with anorexia nervosa received treatment at a particular eating disorders inpatient unit at Columbia University, which helped them gain to a normal weight, the deficits in brain volume began to overturn over the course of only several weeks of weight gain. That puts forward that the reductions in brain matter volume that results from starvation can be upturned with suitable treatment intended at weight restoration.

 But there is still plenty of study to be done. They do not yet have a good sense of the clinical implications of those reductions in brain volume, it was uncertain which regions of the brain are affected and whether the loss of gray matter affects how patients function and react to treatment.

The discovery was reported online in recent times in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.