Emotional eating in patients attending a specialist obesity treatment service.

The prevalence of emotional eating (EE) has increased in the general population over past decades. There is limited information on how common EE is among people seeking obesity treatment. We aimed to estimate the proportion of people with EE, and strength of associations between a predefined set of factors and EE in people referred for obesity treatment. Cross-sectional study recruiting 387 adults from a hospital obesity service. "Emotional eating" was defined as Emotional Eating Scale (EES) score ≥25. Strength of associations were estimated by boot-strapped quantile regression analysis. Results are presented as quantile difference (QD) of EES scores at the 25th, 50th or 75th quantile, and 95% confidence intervals (95%CI). The study population consisted of 71% women, with a median age of 52 years (interquartile range [IQR]: 42, 61), and a median body mass index of 42 kg/m Emotional eating affected more than half of people referred for obesity treatment. Age, sex, use of GLP-1 agonists, history of sleeve gastrectomy and recent bariatric surgery had the strongest associations with EE. These findings allow hypothesis generation about the underlying physiological mechanisms behind emotional eating for investigation in future research.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest PS has participated in Advisory Boards for Novo Nordisk and received payment for a lecture from Novo Nordisk unrelated to this work. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest.