Helen Bould, a Specialty Training Registrar in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the North Bristol NHS Trust at the time, had been trying to pursue research in this area but had been limited in what she could do by having to fit her academic ambitions around clinical commitments and training.
The EBI Clinical Primer scheme, designed to help clinical graduates to experience life as a researcher, enabled Helen to fully immerse herself into research and progress this programme of work. Helen spent her Clinical Primer period at the School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, in the group of Dr Jonathan Evans.
She studied data from Sweden on the number of newly-diagnosed eating disorders in girls born in Stockholm in 1984-1995, and on the schools they went to, to find out whether eating disorders are more common in some high schools (schools for 15-18 year olds) than others.
Results of her studies showed that there are differences between schools in the number of students with eating disorders. Schools with higher proportions of female students, or higher proportions of highly educated parents, had higher rates of eating disorders. Differences between schools remained after taking into account the characteristics of individual students, making it likely that they are due either to differences in school cultures or to eating disorders being contagious.
This is potentially helpful for clinicians in identifying schools where young people are at high risk of developing eating disorders, and also suggests that researchers should try to design interventions for these schools in order to reduce the risk of girls developing eating disorders. Helen has presented her findings at the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Congress 2015 and her paper 'The influence of school on whether girls develop eating disorders' describing this work has been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Having completed her Clinical Primer period, Helen went on to do a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at Oxford University where she is studying whether it is possible to design simple computer tasks to help adolescent girls feel more positive about their bodies, with the aim of designing new interventions to prevent and treat eating disorders.