Psychosomatic syndromes and anorexia nervosa

108 AN inpatients (76 AN restricting subtype, AN-R, and 32 AN binge-purging subtype, AN-BP) were consecutively recruited and psychosomatic syndromes were diagnosed with the Structured Interview for DCPR. Participants were asked to complete psychometric tests: Body Shape Questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory, Eating Disorder Inventory–2, and Temperament and Character Inventory. Data were submitted to cluster analysis.Illness denial (63%) and alexithymia (54.6%) resulted to be the most common syndromes in our sample. Cluster analysis identified three groups: moderate psychosomatic group (49%), somatization group (26%), and severe psychosomatic group (25%). The first group was mainly represented by AN-R patients reporting often only illness denial and alexithymia as DCPR syndromes. The second group showed more severe eating and depressive symptomatology and frequently DCPR syndromes of the somatization cluster. Thanatophobia DCPR syndrome was also represented in this group. The third group reported longer duration of illness and DCPR syndromes were highly represented; in particular, all patients were found to show the alexithymia DCPR syndrome.These results highlight the need of a deep assessment of psychosomatic syndromes in AN. Psychosomatic syndromes correlated differently with both severity of eating symptomatology and duration of illness: therefore, DCPR could be effective to achieve tailored treatments.It is known in scientific literature that anorexia nervosa (AN) is a psychosomatic condition [1-3]. Some authors have recently highlighted the role of several factors like alexithymia [4], emotion and anger dyscontrol [5], and somatization [6] in both development and maintenance of the disorder. It has also been described a psychosomatic and somatopsychic vicious circle as underpinning AN symptomatology [7-9].Moreover, poor interoceptive awareness [10,11] – the inability of discerning the difference between somatic and emotional perception (i.e. feeling “fat” ve