Eating disorders and obsessive–compulsive disorder: A dimensional approach to purported relations

The purpose of this research was to investigate the specificity of purported relations between symptoms of eating disorders (ED) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Whereas most research has focused on diagnostic comorbidity or between-groups analyses, this study took a dimensional approach to investigate specific relations among symptoms of anorexia, bulimia, and OCD, as well as panic, depression, and general distress in a student sample (N = 465). Results were that all symptoms showed significant zero-order correlations, including all ED–OCD pairings. After removing general distress variance, however, none of three OCD scales significantly predicted anorexia; only compulsive washing among OCD scales significantly predicted bulimia. Hierarchical multiple regression demonstrated that panic and depression out-performed OCD in predicting bulimia symptoms. Overall, symptoms of ED and OCD did not show unique relations at the level of core dimensions of each construct. A possible link between bulimia and compulsive washing is worth further study.