Pictures of stick-thin models may be off the hook for triggering eating disorders. A new study adds to evidence that anorexics’ brains are actually wired differently and they are born with a susceptibility to the condition.

Headlines on the reporting of this study, illustrated with photos of suitable models of course, have included

Anorexia not models’ fault – The Sun

Anorexia ‘cannot be picked up by looking at photographs of super-thin models’ – The Times

However there seems to be a slight problem with this conclusion, at least to my mind: the study did not involve pictures of models at all. Nor did it investigate what might trigger anorexia; it actually looked at the brains of recovered anorexics.

Walter Kaye and colleagues rigged 13 healthy women and 13 recovered anorexics up to MRI machines while they played a game that involved financial reward for success. Strangely, in certain parts of the brain which in healthy women registered success and failure differently, anorexics’ brains showed similar responses to both (study abstract). The reason they used recovered anorexics was to remove the possibility their results were confounded by malnutrition.

In layman’s terms: “In anorexia, this might impact on food enjoyment. For anorexics, then, perhaps it is difficult to appreciate immediate pleasure if it does not feel much different from a negative experience,” Kaye says (Times, Daily Mail). “… What this points to is that anorexics have something different going on in their brains, which marks them out as having either different structures in the brain or different pathways for processing thought that stay with them for life.”

It’s not entirely clear to me that finding these brain differences necessarily rules out photos of the super-thin contributing to anorexia problems. Just because A causes B doesn’t mean the C doesn’t cause B too. Nevertheless, this does seem to mean that we can’t put all the blame at the door of catwalk stick insects.

Dr Ian Frampton, a psychologist a Exeter University, is also quoted in the papers. “We are not totally sure what is happening, but we think that some of this might be inherited or some might be due to a fault in the developing brain either in the womb or during early childhood,” he says.