About this Webinar:
Genetic research has changed how eating disorders are understood, first for anorexia nervosa and now for binge eating disorder. Large-scale genetic studies have identified risk factors that fall across two domains. For anorexia nervosa, the signal lands partly on psychiatric traits including anxiety and obsessionality, and partly on metabolic traits including how the body regulates insulin and blood sugar. Body composition plays a role in both anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder. Together, these findings support a model in which eating disorders arise from the convergence of psychiatric vulnerability and metabolic predisposition, and not from psychological factors alone.
This talk closes on what these findings mean for families. Genetic evidence identifies biological pathways that treatments can target, and grounds eating disorders firmly in the body as well as the mind. It is important to understand, however, that this research describes populations rather than individuals. It does not, and cannot, predict who will develop an eating disorder or who will recover. What it does do is give us a clearer and more complete picture of these illnesses, and that is meaningful for every family navigating them.
Guest Bio:
Gerome Breen is Professor of Psychiatric Genetics at King's College London, Academic Director of King's Genomics and Chair of the NIHR Mental Health BioResource.
He leads EDGI-UK, the UK arm of the Klarman Family Foundation Genetics of Eating Disorders Program coordinated by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Eating Disorders Clinical Research Network, which connects NHS eating disorder services so that people in treatment can take part in research wherever they live. His group runs long-read sequencing studies of anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder at King's Genomics, looking for the parts of the genome that older methods could not read, and works with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Eating Disorders Working Group.
Alongside this he co-founded the GLAD Study of anxiety and depression, one of the largest mental health cohorts in the world, and researches how genetic differences shape response to psychiatric medication.
People with lived experience and their families shape the design of every study his group runs.
Date: Wednesday, November 18th, 2026
Time: 9:00 AM Pacific / 12:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM UK
Location: Zoom Platform
United States
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