EDNOS: A Diminished Diagnosis in DSM-V?

A team of eating disorders professionals from Portugal designed a test to assess the impact of proposed changes in diagnostic criteria in the coming DSM-V on the prevalence of cases of eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS) in the community. As Dr. P. Machado and colleagues reported at the September 15-17 European Council of Eating Disorders, in Firenze, Italy, when they re-analyzed 85 cases of EDNOS drawn from two epidemiologic study community samples (n=3048) and reclassified them using both the provisional criteria of the DSM-V and the proposed criteria for Broad Categories for the Diagnosis of Eating Disorders (BCD-ED), the diagnosis applied to far fewer patients. The authors found that applying the draft proposed by the DSM-V workgroup (www.dsm5.org) dramatically reduced the number of previously diagnosed cases of EDNOS from 85 to 55. Using the Walsh and Sysko (2009) proposal of a set of broad categories of eating disorders, the number of EDNOS cases dropped from 85 to 5.