Cognitive Training for Patients With Eating Disorders

Nine individual transdiagnostic CRT sessions will be delivered once per week, each session lasting approximately 45 minutes. Building on previously published CRT manuals for anorexia nervosa and obesity, a transdiagnostic CRT manual developed for this project will be used during the course of CRT treatment. The manual comprises an introduction to CRT for eating disorders, and a detailed nine-session structure incorporating cognitive and behavioral tasks in the following domains; (1) planning-impulsivity, (2) flexibility-rigidity and (3) central coherence-attention to details. A certain set of guiding questions will accompany each task with the aim of stimulating metacognition (i.e. thinking about thinking).

According to Norwegian guidelines established by the Norwegian Directorate of Health, the patients are likely to receive treatment focusing directly on the ED symptomatology, i.e normalization of weight in the case of underweight, reduction of binging and purging and normalization of other ED related thoughts and behaviors. Since both in-patients, patients in day treatment and out-patients will be included in the study, the number of hours with therapeutic interventions will vary. Records of the participants' received number of therapeutic hours will be logged weekly during the intervention for participants in both arms of the study.