NICE Guidelines for eating disorders

The long awaited National Institute for Clinical Evidence (NICE) guidelines for the treatment of eating disorders are to be published next wednesday. They will be available from the NICE website. Currently just the draft guidelines are there.

I was lucky enough to attend a day conference on the guidelines and their implications in Warwick today - more interesting than it sounds in fact.

Simon Gowers, chair of the panel who came up with the guidelines, gave an excellent presentation summarising the main points of the guidelines. The strongest evidence is available for bulimia nervosa treatment, with CBT coming out on top. Evidence for the treatment of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders is pretty lacking, which is disappointing; hopefully the silver lining to this cloud will be sympathetic consideration of applications to funding bodies for this type of research.

Having spent many hours on the road today, I will save the details of the rest of the presentations for another time. Suffice to say that I wait with interest to see the impact of the guidelines on treatment available for eating disorders in the UK.