ABSTRACT
With current treatments for anorexia nervosa (AN) failing to reach acceptable standards of treatment outcome (Bulik, Berkman, Brownley, Sedway, & Lohr, 2007), the need for innovative treatment approaches is well established (Strober & Johnson, 2012). Amongst contemporary treatment approaches, family therapy approaches have amassed a particularly robust evidence base supporting their application in medically stable adolescent presentations of AN (Downs & Blow, 2013). Family-based therapy for anorexia nervosa (FT-AN) is a manualized family treatment (Lock & Le Grange, 2012) with a specific eating disorder focus, which centrally leverages parental and family resources in directly intervening in an adolescent’s behavioral symptom profile. FT-AN demonstrates promising empirical evidence, in that up to 70 percent of patients are weight-restored within a year of commencing treatment (Le Grange & Eisler, 2009), and up to 40 percent of patients are remitted of cognitive symptoms within a year (Lock & Le Grange, 2012).
