Predictors of Treatment Outcome in Eating Disorders: A Roadmap to Inform Future Research Efforts

With the current review, we provide a brief summary of recent literature that tests clinically observable characteristics at baseline that may impact treatment response, across eating disorder diagnoses. We then provide a critical discussion regarding how researchers may shift their approach to this research to improve treatment implications and generalizability of these findings.

Recent work has broadly replicated prior findings suggesting a negative impact of lower weight status, poor emotion regulation, and early-life trauma on eating disorder treatment outcomes. Findings are more mixed for the relative contributions of illness duration, psychiatric comorbidity, and baseline symptom severity. Recent studies have begun to explore more specific domains of previously tested predictors (e.g., specific comorbidities) as well as previously neglected identity-related and systemic factors. However, recent research continues to use similar sampling techniques and approaches to analysis used in prior work. We propose that resolving remaining questions and illuminating predictors of treatment outcome in eating disorders requires a new approach to research sampling and study design. Suggested changes that can be applied within a traditional clinical trial framework may yield new insights with relevance across transdiagnostic eating disorder presentations.