How Much Can We Learn About Eating Disorders From Animal Research?
I have been studying the neurobehavioral aspects of food and drug reinforcement for the past 5 years (read more about it on my profile page). This involves using rats to mimic basic human behaviors surrounding food and drug intake. I then manipulate various neurotransmitter systems by using drugs and observe the effects this manipulation has on the behaviors I am interested in.
What’s important to this type of research is that we constantly challenge and evaluate the validity of using these animal models to study complex human diseases and disorders. Validity can be divided into several categories, but I’m going to focus on two in particular and relate them to an animal model of binge food intake. These two types of validity are predictive validity and construct validity:
- Predictive validity, when comparing animal research to human research, refers to the ability for some measure of animal behavior