Pharmacotherapy in Anorexia Nervosa: An Overview.

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a serious, debilitating and potentially lethal disease because of the marked dysfunctions it evokes. Therapy for AN is essentially multidisciplinary, with nutri-tional, medical and psychotherapeutic interventions. Many drugs, particularly psychoactive agents, have been tested during the past decades, trying to improve the clinical and psycho-pathological conditions on the basis of AN symptomatology. All psychotic drugs, from antide-pressants to mood-stabilizers, from antipsychotics to benzodiazepines, have been tried, but re-sults have not been very encouraging. One of the main limitations in the evaluation of phar-macologic therapy is that anorexic patients often refuse drugs, as they consider it invasive for their personality. For this reason, in the literature, there are few controlled and randomized studies over long periods and on wide casuistics of patients. The aim of this review is to evalu-ate data on drug usage in AN treatment, compared with the more recent evidences on the role of biological factors implicated in AN aetiopathogenesis.