Title Eye movements and eating disorders: protocol for an exploratory experimental study examining the relationship in young-adult women with subclinical symptomatology
Authors NAVAS LEON, SERGIO, SÁNCHEZ MARTÍN, MILAGROSA, TAJADURA JIMÉNEZ, ANA, De Coster, Lize , Borda-Mas, Mercedes , MORALES MÁRQUEZ, LUIS
External publication No
Means J Eat Disord
Scope Article
Nature Científica
JCR Quartile 1
SJR Quartile 2
JCR Impact 4.10000
SJR Impact 0.83300
Web https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85128180206&doi=10.1186%2fs40337-022-00573-2&partnerID=40&md5=5b9d3aeceb26b41169029460f7f6dbbb
Publication date 08/04/2022
ISI 000782185400001
Scopus Id 2-s2.0-85128180206
DOI 10.1186/s40337-022-00573-2
Abstract Background Recent research indicates that patients with anorexia (AN) show specific eye movement abnormalities such as shorter prosaccade latencies, more saccade inhibition errors, and increased rate of saccadic intrusions compared to participants without AN. However, it remains unknown whether these abnormal eye movement patterns, which may serve as potential biomarkers and endophenotypes for an early diagnosis and preventive clinical treatments, start to manifest also in people with subclinical eating disorders (ED) symptomatology. Therefore, we propose a protocol for an exploratory experimental study to investigate whether participants with subclinical ED symptomatology and control participants differ in their performance on several eye movement tasks. Methods The sample will be recruited through convenience sampling. The Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire will be administered as a screening tool to split the sample into participants with subclinical ED symptomatology and control participants. A fixation task, prosaccade/antisaccade task, and memory-guided task will be administered to both groups. Additionally, we will measure anxiety and premorbid intelligence as confounding variables. Means comparison, exploratory Pearson\'s correlations and discriminant analysis will be performed. Discussion This study will be the first to elucidate the presence of specific eye movement abnormalities in participants with subclinical ED symptomatology. The results may open opportunities for developing novel diagnostic tools/therapies being helpful to the EDs research community and allied fields.
Keywords Antisaccade; Eating disorders; Inhibitory control; Memory-guided saccade; Prosaccade; Saccades; Subclinical population; Square wave jerks; Visual memory
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