Pamela Keel
Florida State University, FL·Psychology
Are eating disorders becoming more or less common across generations, and what happens to them as people move from college into midlife? Eating disorders affect millions of women and men in the United States and cost the economy billions of dollars each year.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
eating disorders
anorexia nervosa
bulimia nervosa
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Compare eating disorder prevalence and symptom scores across five random cohorts of college students surveyed in 1982, 1992, 2002, 2012 and 2022 to measure generational change.
- Track the course of eating pathology from late adolescence to midlife through 10- to 40-year follow-up surveys, testing whether trajectories differ among Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials.
- Identify adulthood-specific predictors of eating disorder trajectories and examine how gender and generation shape them, using survey and interview data.
- Validate survey-based eating disorder diagnoses through interviews with affected participants and matched controls, and assess psychosocial function, suicidality, comorbidity and treatment history.
More about the research
Yet little is known about how their prevalence has changed over time or how they unfold across adulthood.
Why it matters
Eating disorders affect an estimated 14.4 million women and 6.6 million men in the US and cost about $64.7 billion a year. This study could provide a benchmark for whether public health efforts are reducing that burden. It could also identify adult risk factors that point to intervention targets: what to change, in whom and when.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Carolina Makowski
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify behavioral and neuroimaging correlates of eating disorders in youth from the ABCD Study (ages 11–14) and in a clinical sample of adolescent girls in treatment (ages 13–18), using measures of brain shape and whole-brain microstructure.
Sasha Gorrell
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Engage youth, caregivers and clinician stakeholders during a preparatory phase to adapt a single-session consultation protocol for families waiting for specialty eating disorder treatment.
Emily Barkley-Levenson
Hofstra University, NY·Psychology
Test whether females aged 16-22 with restricting-type anorexia nervosa show greater aversion to ambiguous outcomes than matched healthy controls on a validated choice task that separates risky from ambiguous gambles.
The school
Florida State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $461M a year on research, 481 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.