Eating disorders affect an estimated 9% of Americans — nearly 30 million people — and can impact a person’s eating behaviors and perceptions about food and their bodies. The UofL research, backed by three grants, will investigate how eating disorders may develop in childhood and adolescence, their contribution to suicidal behaviors and how innovative personalized treatment may offer hope.

“UofL has made a longstanding commitment to groundbreaking research and discovery that makes a positive impact on our world,” said President Kim Schatzel. “This is research that can save and improve the lives of millions of Americans and many, many more around the world impacted by eating disorders.”

The work is led by researcher Cheri Levinson, who specializes in the study and intervention of eating and anxiety disorders. The key, she said, is a personalized approach to diagnosis and treatment, recognizing that these disorders affect people of all different ages, ethnicities, gender identities and backgrounds, and individualizing treatment to each specific person.

“Despite the high prevalence of these conditions, there are few available treatment and prevention options,” said Levinson, an associate professor in the UofL College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab. “This work not only will create options, but opens this whole possibility for treatments that are personalized based on the individual. Because eating disorders don’t just affect one kind of person and there are a multitude of different factors that can influence them.”

Through an NIH research project grant totaling nearly $4 million, Levinson’s team will study how eating disorders develop in childhood and beyond, with the hope their findings can help avert the large personal and societal costs associated with childhood onset and chronic disorders. Recent show more than one in five kids worldwide may show signs of disordered eating.

A second project grant, also nearly $4 million, will identify patterns of anorexia nervosa — an eating disorder characterized by a fear of gaining weight — that contribute to suicide risk, with data providing a model of personalized psychiatric medicine and new methods of prevention and treatment. Currently, patients with anorexia have a suicide risk 18 times higher than those without an eating disorder.

The third grant, a prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, also worth nearly $4 million across two phases, will further the creation and dissemination of a novel personalized treatment for eating disorders and integrate social determinants of health (food insecurity, racism) into treatment. The New Innovator Award, part of NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, supports unusually innovative research from early-career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency. Levinson is the first from UofL and the first studying eating disorders to receive this award.

“Our mission at the College of Arts and Sciences is to improve life in the Commonwealth, including by creating new knowledge through groundbreaking research and innovation,” said Dayna Touron, the college’s dean. “Dr. Levinson’s work will undoubtedly improve the lives of millions living with eating disorders, and we are very proud to count her among our faculty.”

These grants are the culmination of years of groundbreaking work by Levinson and her team, for which they earned a UofL Trailblazer Award in early 2023. The research has also received support through UofL’s Office of Research and Innovation, including mentoring through the Ascending Stars Fellows Program for promising mid-career faculty. 

Work to develop a companion personalized treatment application and virtual reality technology has also been supported by the office’s Innovation and Commercialization and UofL New Ventures teams. This includes patenting, entrepreneurial coaching and training and financial support through two innovation development programs: KYNETIC, focused on furthering biomedical technologies, and PRePARE, focused on technologies that address a health or societal problem resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“UofL has built a strong and vibrant ecosystem and supports for important research like this, that can improve and save lives,” said Kevin Gardner, UofL’s executive vice president for research and innovation. “We’re so proud of the work Dr. Levinson and her team are doing and the positive impacts it will have across the U.S. and the globe.”

The Body Project recently received a $125,000 grant from JHF, which provides grants aimed at improving health outcomes and supporting medical research in Louisville and Kentucky.

The funding will be used for training, materials, staffing and outreach for the Body Project to expand across Louisville, especially into the West End, a traditionally lower-income area with a high population of underrepresented minorities.

The Body Project has been used successfully in two private, all-girls Louisville high schools, and , over several years and is expected to be used in and beginning this fall. 

It is part of UofL’s founded by Cheri Levinson, associate professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, and directed by clinical psychology doctoral student Brenna Williams. UofL grad Jillian Winn is a study coordinator for the High School Body Project expansion.

Levinson is also medical director of the , the state’s only center of its kind.

Jennifer Shanks, a personal wellness counselor at Mercy Academy, called eating disorders a “hidden illness” made worse by poor role-modeling of body images and “exacerbated by social media messaging.” 

The EAT Lab is staffed by a team of postdoctoral fellows, doctoral, graduate and undergraduate UofL students. The team coordinates all aspects of the lab, including current work developing and implementing National Institute of Mental Health-funded research into new treatments and technologies for eating disorders and promoting outreach and support for those with eating disorders in the community.

A 2019 article published in the journal presented the first findings from Body Project implementation at Mercy and Presentation. The data showed the project was effective in decreasing feelings of social appearance anxiety, physical and social anxiety sensitivity, rumination, worry, perfectionism and guilt. 

More than 600 high school students have taken part in the project. A version of the Body Project has also been developed for college students.

In partnership with the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), local community volunteers are trained in how to present Body Project materials over four weeks. Participants are asked to assess eating disorder symptoms, such as a desire to be thin, body dissatisfaction, anxiety and depression, both before and after the project’s duration.

In the grant application, Levinson noted that eating disorders are diagnosed at younger ages than ever — sometimes as early as 12 years old. Last year, 10,000 deaths in the U.S. were blamed on eating disorders.

In addition, despite stereotypes that eating disorders affect only affluent, young, white women, they “impact everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or sexual orientation,” Levinson said. 

In Kentucky, the few prevention and treatment options that exist are not available to everyone who needs them. 

“Despite the high prevalence of EDs in children and adolescents in Kentucky, there are few prevention and treatment options,” Levinson said. “For example, there is no program in the U.S. that accepts Kentucky Medicaid for higher-level ED treatment, meaning that our children and adolescents in Kentucky supported by Medicaid are often left to die without treatment.”

Since 2012, the JHF has invested more than $69 million in more than .

This year’s projects have included the study of probiotics’ impact on your gut, conspiracies on what happened in the Sandy Hook shooting and the UofL EAT Lab’s research on eating disorders.

 “We want to stress that our undergraduates have access to work that in other places only graduate students get access to,” said Charlie Leonard, a UofL honors program professor. “The best UofL undergraduates are as good as any ivy league or West Coast schools.”

The UofL faculty pushed the undergrads to apply critical thinking and investigative skills to complete important, basic research.  

“I gained a greater appreciation for science and all that the trials and tribulations (researchers) go through to generate such data. It was really great,” said UofL student Orion Rushin.

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