Health, 2015, 7, 1327-1336 Published Online October 2015 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/health http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/health.2015.710147 How to cite this paper: Sillanpää, V., Mattila, K. and Sumanen, M. (2015) Childhood Adversities Associated with Eating Dis- orders Reported by Adults. Health, 7, 1327-1336. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/health.2015.710147 Childhood Adversities Associated with Eating Disorders Reported by Adults Veera Sillanpää 1 , Kari Mattila 1,2 , Markku Sumanen 1 1 Department of General Practice, Medical school, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland 2 Centre for General Practice, Pirkanmaa Hospital District, Tampere, Finland Email: markku.sumanen@uta.fi Received 21 September 2015; accepted 18 October 2015; published 21 October 2015 Copyright © 2015 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract Background: It has been suggested that childhood events increase the risk of suffering from an eating disorder (ED) in adolescence or young adulthood. Our study here aimed at investigating whether there was an association between stressful childhood events and eating disorders later in life. Methods: Our population-based study was a part of the HeSSup (The Health and Social Support) postal survey in 2003, a follow-up survey with a random sample of working-aged subjects drawn from the Finnish Population Register in 1998. Participants in this study reported having been suf- fering from ED (N = 374), while controls (N = 18,639) reported no history of eating disorder in the questionnaire both in 1998 and 2003. The questionnaire included six questions related to child- hood adversities. Results: Each childhood stressor increased the risk of developing ED cumula- tively (one adversity OR 1.7 versus all six OR 8.3). Intrafamiliar conflicts (OR 2.0), being afraid of a family member (OR 1.5) or long-term illnesses in the family (OR 1.4) increased the ED-risk statis- tical significantly. Conclusion: Children exposed to stress are more likely to suffer from eating disorders as adults than those not exposed. Keywords Childhood Adversities, Stressful Life Events, Eating Disorders, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa 1. Introduction Anorexia nervosa (AN) with estimated prevalence of 0.2% - 0.9% and bulimia nervosa (BN) with 0.5% - 4.5% of sufferers are the most well-known forms of eating disorders (ED) [1]. Others include, for example, binge eat- ing disorder (BED), with a prevalence of approximately 2% - 3% [2]. The highest risk for developing anorexia is between ages 14 and 19 years, and for bulimia, it is between ages 17 and 21 years [3].