A controlled trial of a dissonance-based eating disorders prevention program with Brazilian girls

Ana Carolina Soares Amaral,Maria Elisa Caputo Ferreira,Eric Stice

doi:10.1186/s41155-019-0126-3

Abstract

BackgroundGiven that most young women with eating disorders do not receive treatment, implementing effective prevention programs is a public health priority. The Body Project is a group-based eating disorder prevention program with evidence of both efficacy and effectiveness. This trial evaluated the efficacy of this prevention program with Brazilian girls, as no published study has tested whether this intervention is culturally sensitive and efficacious with Latin-American adolescents.MethodsFemale students were allocated to a dissonance-based intervention (n = 40) or assessment-only (n = 22) condition. The intervention was a dissonance-based program, consisted of four group sessions aimed to reduce thin-ideal internalization. The sessions included verbal, written, and behavioral exercises. The intervention group was evaluated at pretest and posttest; assessment-only controls completed measures at parallel times.ResultsCompared to assessment-only controls, intervention participants showed a significantly greater reduction in body dissatisfaction, sociocultural influence of the media, depressive symptoms, negative affect, as well as significantly greater increases in body appreciation. There were no significant effects for disordered eating attitudes and eating disorder symptoms.ConclusionsThese results suggest that this dissonance-based eating disorder prevention program was culturally sensitive, or at least culturally adaptive, and efficacious with Brazilian female adolescents. Indeed, the average effect size was slightly larger than has been observed in the large efficacy trial of this prevention program and in recent meta-analytic reviews.Trial registrationRBR-7prdf2. Registered 13 August 2018 (retrospectively registered).

Highlights

Given that most young women with eating disorders do not receive treatment, implementing effective prevention programs is a public health priority
As 80–90% of those with eating disorders do not receive treatment (Swanson, Crow, Le Grange, Swendsen, & Merikangas, 2011), a public health priority is to broadly implement effective eating disorder prevention programs focused in eating disorders risk factors, such as body dissatisfaction
Girls in the intervention group were classified as no dissatisfied and the assessment-only controls showed slight dissatisfaction evaluated by the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ)

Summary

Introduction

Given that most young women with eating disorders do not receive treatment, implementing effective prevention programs is a public health priority. The Body Project is a group-based eating disorder prevention program with evidence of both efficacy and effectiveness This trial evaluated the efficacy of this prevention program with Brazilian girls, as no published study has tested whether this intervention is culturally sensitive and efficacious with Latin-American adolescents. As 80–90% of those with eating disorders do not receive treatment (Swanson, Crow, Le Grange, Swendsen, & Merikangas, 2011), a public health priority is to broadly implement effective eating disorder prevention programs focused in eating disorders risk factors, such as body dissatisfaction. Other studies conducted in Brazil have found that media contributes to body image disturbances, among adolescent girls and young women (Alvarenga, Dunker, Philippi, & Scagliusi, 2010; Fortes, Amaral, Almeida, & Ferreira, 2013)

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