Abstract
There has been no systematic research done on children with eating disorders in Japan up to this point. We, the physicians at the branch of pediatrics of Osaka University Hospital, Schousinen, and The Psychosomatic Children's Clinic investigated our subjects with eating disorders bet. ween April 1976 and May 1993 (17 years and 2 months) to know the characteristics of childhood eating disorders. We have examined 123 subjects who met diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa from the Ministry of Health and Welfare and for bulimia nervosa from DSM-iii-R. There were very few subjects below the age of 9,several subjects between the ages of 10 and 12,but the numbers increased gradually for subjects over the age of 13. We devided the subjects into three groups according to age : childhood, pre-puberty, and puberty in pediatrics. The subjects below the age of 12 showed no evidence of secondary sexual development. Therefore we considered that subjects below the age of 12 were typical pre-pubertal characteristic samples in childhood. There were 20 samples below age of 12 (18 girls and 2 boys) . Most of them had nearly the same characteristics as the adolescence cases except for binge eating and vomiting. Therefore, therapy for "under-age-twelve" samples was the same and equally difficult as therapy for adolescents.
