Cognitive-behavioural therapy for adolescents with bulimia nervosa<FNR></FNR><FN>Adapted, in part, from a paper prepared for the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands', Adolescent Mental Health Initiative, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and published as Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders (2005), edited by Dwight L. Evans and Edna B. Foa, et al., Copyright Oxford University Press, Inc. This article contains excerpts from that publication, used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. </FN>

Psychological and pharmacological treatments for bulimia nervosa (BN) have been studied extensively in adults, but there are no published controlled treatment studies of adolescents with BN. One option for treating adolescents with BN is to adapt cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for younger individuals. The rationale for developing CBT for adolescents with BN is three-fold: the efficacy of CBT for adult patients with BN, the efficacy of CBT in treating adolescents with other clinical disorders, and the conceptual fit between CBT and adolescent eating disorders. CBT should be tailored to the treatment of adolescents, with particular focus on domains of development, including: motivation, cognitive processing, interpersonal functioning, and family involvement. A recently described new version of CBT for BN (Fairburn, Cooper, & Shafran, <BIBR>2003</BIBR>) is well-suited for adapting manual-based CBT from adults to adolescents. Future research should evaluate the efficacy of CBT for the treatment of adolescents with BN and related eating disorders. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]