Anorexia can affect all age groups

Marg Oaten's daughter was a happy, healthy girl who loved table tennis and drama until at the age of 10 she developed anorexia. Twelve years on she is still fighting the illness, which almost killed her.

"I was absolutely distraught," said Oaten, 54. "It is the worst thing in the world to know your daughter might die." At her darkest point, Oaten said her daughter existed on five flakes of cereal a day, washed down with a mouthful of water.

Children as young as seven can suffer from eating disorders. The illness also afflicts older women as well as men and boys, though it is most common in young women, health experts say.

In Britain, about 5 to 10 percent of women ages 14 to 24 suffer from some form of eating disorder. The ratio falls to 1 percent for the whole female population, said Professor Janet Treasure, head of the eating disorders service and research unit at King's College London.

Bulimia nervosa, when a person binges and vomits, is two to five times more common than anorexia nervosa, when someone restricts their intake of food and drink, she said.

Both psychiatric disorders, can be fatal - two models from Latin America died this year after becoming anorexic - or cause permanent health defects such as brittle bones and infertility.

For Oaten's daughter, who wanted to remain anonymous, the fear of changes to her body as she approached adolescence coupled with bullying at school drove her to stop eating.

Her weight plunged and she ended up in hospital where she was treated as an inpatient and eventually allowed home. Two years later, however, she developed bulimia.

Now, at 22, she has had surgery for a prolapsed bowel and still makes herself sick, but she is trying to get better, said Oaten, who has used her experience with eating disorders to set up a support group in Hull, northern England, to help others.

CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS 7 HAVE ANOREXIA

DR Jon Goldin, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, said: "We see children here as young as seven or eight with anorexia, but that is very rare."

Asked why youngsters develop a problem with food so early on, he said: "One contributing factor is that maybe children are under more pressure now than they were 10 or 20 years ago and somehow childhood is being prematurely shortened."

A perception in society that thin is glamorous, compounded by images of waif-like celebrities in magazines, is another of the many factors that triggers anorexia and bulimia.

But far from being sexy, the reality of the illness is lonely and desperate.

Victims say they secretly starve their bodies or binge and then vomit until there is nothing left but the taste of stomach acid on their lips. They often exercise obsessively and feel fat even when grossly underweight.