A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine at USC conducted the first known comparison of the brains of boys and girls with binge eating disorders and discovered notable changes in brain structure between the sexes.

The research was recently published in Psychological Medicine. The study, which builds on earlier work suggesting that binge eating disorder is wired in the brain from an early age, is an important first step in understanding the neurobiology of binge eating disorder and how it differs between the sexes.

It also presents critical evidence that males, who in the past were left out of research on eating disorders, must be included in future efforts to understand the origins of eating disorders.