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Published on: July 29, 2020
Being bullied and using drugs are associate with eating disorder symptoms in Brazilian students
Patricia Paiva de O Galvão1, Juliana Y Valente1, Mireille Coêlho Almeida2
1Department of Preventive Medicine, Section of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
Objective:
This study's main purpose is to evaluate factors associated with eating disorder (ED) symptoms among Brazilian adolescents.
Method:
The sample consisted of 5,213 students, mean age 13.24 (SD ±0.01), in the eighth grade of 93 public schools from three Brazilian cities. Data were collected through an anonymous self-report questionnaire, assessing: sociodemographics, use of alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, binge drinking, bullying, and ED symptoms. We used confirmatory factor analysis and multivariate linear regression.
Results:
We found that high levels of bullying victimization, binge drinking and the use of unprescribed weight-loss substances were associated with higher levels of ED symptoms to both genders. However, only among girls, the higher age (β = .10; 95% CI = 0.02; 0.17) and the use of illicit drugs (β = .21; 95% CI = 0.094; 0.34) were associated with increase in the ED symptoms.
Discussion:
We demonstrate a significant association of ED symptoms with drug use and bullying, highlighting the importance of addressing these factors in the development of ED prevention strategies.
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