Editorial: The Altered Brain Network Architecture of Anorexia Nervosa

A deeper understanding of neurobiological basis of disease is key to mental health research and clinical practice. This could lead to more targeted treatments, improved survival rates, and better outcomes. This is the challenge now undertaken by scientists around the globe who study the human brain in health and disease to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes. Several well-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have established the existence of differences in brain structure in several groups of patients compared to healthy individuals.¹ Recent technological advances in network analyses allowing examination of whole-brain connectivity are moving the field forward, providing evidence that major psychiatric disorders arise from perturbations in a complex network of highly connected, anatomically distributed neural systems rather than dysfunctions of circumscribed brain regions.².