Eating disorders in South Africa: an inter-ethnic comparison of admission data.

Eating disorders among black South African females were first reported in 1995, having been documented among white South African females since the 1970s.1 There appears to be no subsequent literature that relates specifically to clinical cases of eating disorders among black female South Africans.2 Differences in disorder presentation, on the basis of race, has been suggested in the international literature,3 although Szabo et al.1 found no specific clinical features that were unique to the black patients compared with white female sufferers. We explored possible differences in admission psychometric data among hospitalised black and white eating disorder (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa) sufferers and found preliminary evidence for similarity of admission psychometric data for eating disorder sufferers, irrespective of race, in South Africa. Future research may not warrant racial categorisation of data, specifically for research purposes into eating disorders in South Africa.