Disordered eating is twice as common in type 1 diabetes than in peers without type 1 diabetes (De Jonge et al., 2014)
Working with Dr Marietta Stadler at King’s College London and the King’s College Hospital and King’s Health Partners Diabetes Research Team, we’ve started to understand how disordered eating develops and what perpetuates this difficulty in type 1 diabetes. We’re using this knowledge to develop a cognitive behavioural therapy intervention. We’re testing this as part of a NiHR funded project called STEADY (Safe management of people with Type 1 diabetes and EAting Disorder StudY)
What have we learnt so far?
1) A Cognitive Behavioural Model of Type 1 Diabetes and Disordered Eating informed by Lived Experience
We’ve worked with 23 women with experience of disordered eating and type 1 diabetes to understand how eating disorders present and interact with type 1 diabetes.
We’ve written about this work in the journal Diabetic Medicine.
2) Developing and testing a novel treatment for type 1 diabetes and disordered eating
We’ve developed a new cognitive behavioural informed treatment to help people with type 1 diabetes and disordered eating.
The treatment tool kit was co-designed with people with lived experience of type 1 diabetes and disordered eating, and healthcare professionals with experience of supporting people in clinical settings. You can learn more about this study here.
You can read more about the study we are conducting to test this treatment here. We’ll bring this to an end in February 2024, and I’ll let you know what we find as soon as I can!
Want to find out more?
3) Disordered Eating and Type 1 Diabetes in Men
More recently, we’ve been addressing some of the shortcomings of our model - it was developed based on the experiences of women.
So, we went and interviewed 27 men with lived experience of type 1 diabetes and disordered eating, and we found some similarities and differences between the experiences of men and women.
I presented this work at the Diabetes UK Conference in 2023, where it was nominated for a Psychological Care award. You can look at my poster here and hear me speaking about this research here.
This research has been accepted for publication in Diabetic Medicine, and I will post a link here when it’s online.