Athletes and Eating Disorders
Pain and Fractures Linked to Disordered Eating
The development of stress fractures correlates with eating disorders.
Athletes are the biggest example of erratic eating causing physical pain and stress fractures. The cause and effect relationship occurs when individuals consume low-calorie diets in order to lose weight and fat. But instead of improving performance, it can lead to serious injury.
The same also holds true for people who over-exercise. Without the proper nutritional intake to go along with the routine, injury can occur when the body can’t repair muscles.
A study was done by the Saint Louis University to research risk factors for exercise-related pain in women participating in 4 sports: cross-country running, field hockey, soccer and volleyball. The results were published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.
Women who had an insufficient caloric intake were more likely to develop stress fractures as a result of decreased estrogen production, says researcher Mark Reinking, PT, Ph.D., chairman of the department of physical therapy at Saint Louis University’s Doisy College of Health Sciences.
“When people expend more calories than they consume, they release fewer hormones, which slows down menstrual cycles. This decreases estrogen in the body, which is responsible for bone development,” says Reinking, who also sites leg pain as the most common problem.
“It causes people to miss practices and competitions, and I wanted to understand if two people were undergoing the same exercise regime, why only one of them would have leg pain,” he says. “It’s not as simple as ‘Run less’ or ‘Change your shoes every 300 miles.’ It’s a complex problem, and you can’t prevent something if you don’t know what causes it.”
The study revealed that those who had more abnormal scores on the eating behaviour questionnaire, as well as showed decreased bone mineral density, had disorder eating patterns and nutritional deficiency.
Read the accompanying blog entry here.
