Minnesota Obesity Center

Disordered Eating Assessment Core

Director: Scott J. Crow, M.D.

 

Doctor's OfficeThe Disordered Eating Assessment Core assists Minnesota Obesity Center investigators in the assessment of disordered eating and other psychopathology, and the development of interventions for such disordered eating. These services are applicable both to the study of obesity and to the study of “classic” forms of disordered eating including clinically diagnosable eating disorders. Services provided through this Core are organized in the following sections:

  1. Clinical Assessment: The Core provides consultation regarding assessment of disordered eating and other behaviors; training and ongoing quality improvement/quality assurance for trained assessors; and the conduct of structured assessments.
  2. Treatment Development: The Core provides consultation to investigators regarding the development of manual-based treatments for obesity and disordered eating, and is actively engaged in such development efforts. In addition, the Core provides certain structured therapeutic interventions (such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) for ongoing projects.
  3. Access to Clinical Populations: The Core provides access to populations of potential subjects with eating disorders diagnoses; subjects with other psychopathology; non-affected comparison groups; obese samples; and archival data sets.
  4. Technology-Based Methods of Data Accumulation: The Core provides access to several emerging technologies for the highly accurate on cost-effective accumulation of research data, such as ecological momentary assessment, and data scanning/online data entry.
  5. Cost Effectiveness Analysis: The Core provides consultation regarding the collection of cost effectiveness data in clinical trials.

Services provided by this Core are highly labor-intensive, requiring individuals with advanced training plus expensive, specialized experience in behavioral assessments, treatments or both. It would be impractical, expensive and often impossible for investigators to re-create this capacity in their own group.

Advancements in Disordered Eating Assessment.