Eating Disorders Program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Expands to Include Yo...( PALO ALTO Calif. March 18 /- The ...),Health

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- The Comprehensive Eating Disorders Program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford is expanding to treat young adults ages 18 to 21. This allows the program to now offer treatment to older adolescents and college students.

"I am delighted that the Eating Disorders Program is being made available to our undergraduate age group," said Naomi Brown, PhD, an eating disorders treatment specialist at Stanford's Vaden Health Center for students. "Having access to such a renowned program is very important to those eating disordered students who need a higher level of care."

Eating disorders are often thought of as a uniquely adolescent problem. But, as Brown indicates, the condition can linger into or even begin in young adulthood. Packard Children's has coupled the longest continuously running inpatient eating disorders program in the Bay Area with an outpatient program that coordinates medical and psychiatric treatment. Through the years, the program has helped thousands of patients.

"We provide the most advanced, most effective treatments available," said child psychiatrist James Lock, MD, PhD. Lock, who is the program's psychiatric director, pioneered a family-based treatment known as the Maudsley method in 2001 and published the first treatment manual using this approach.

"We're very family and developmentally oriented, and able to understand and address the differences between what a 9- versus a 14- versus a 21-year-old patient will need. It's a blame-free, solution-focused approach," said Lock.

He and his colleagues tailor their therapies to the specific family dilemmas, age and circumstances of each patient. Although hospitalization was the norm in years past, the team has found that many patients benefit from maintaining their social and academic connections while undergoing treatment.

"Lengthy hospitalizations used to be common," said Lock, "because we had no effe
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