Karine pato hoffmann biography

Revolutionized the understanding of risk factors for eating disorders by demonstrating the role of genetic factors in influencing risk for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder and escorting the science from family studies to twin studies, through linkage and candidate gene studies, into the genome-wide association study era.

At the beginning of my career, eating disorders were widely considered to be purely sociocultural in origin and related to family dysfunction. Unconvinced, my dissertation focused on family psychiatric history and family environment in women with bulimia nervosa and identified significantly elevated relative risk for alcohol abuse and dependence. My work went on to identify the familiality of eating disorders, the heritability of eating disorders as determined by twin studies, significant linkage peaks for both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, and the largest GWAS study ever conducted of anorexia nervosa. As the found

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