Eating disorders affect almost 30 million Americans.

And researchers at the University of Louisville have a creative prevention tool by letting patients face their fears and anxieties with virtual reality.

There's more in tonight's medical news.

Eating disorders are psychiatric disorders.

They're very serious.

They take a life every 52 minutes and Kentucky alone, there will be 400,000 individuals that will have an eating disorder in their lifetime.

And it's it's extremely serious.

And it's the second killer of all psychiatric illnesses.

It's getting way worse, which is very serious.

And treatments aren't very effective for most people, especially with adults.

There are options, but they only work for about 50% or less of the people that have access to them and seek that treatment.

We saw that in anxiety treatments that people were using exposures and so exposures are facing your fears systematically instead of running from them.

We're developing different modules within the VR headset that can be used with their clinician or also as homework or hopefully with people that don't have access to care or on waiting lists.

So they put on the goggles and then they choose their body color and their hair color and they make an avatar that is is them and that they that they feel looks like them.

And then they're systematically experiencing if it's fear of weight gain, they're systematically experiencing that weight gain and they're moving in their body and they can look down on their body and see that their body is changing and they can process the different fears and how it might feel to dress that body and all of the different things that come along with that.

It's very intense and it's very dramatic and as they keep it keeps getting worse and worse and worse, but their anxiety starts to come down and and that starts to train them that, oh, yeah, either that was terrible, but I handled it or or, you know, that wasn't as bad as I thought.

Or maybe that was as bad as I thought.

But I'm I'm okay.

And so then during the week, they're eating disorder behaviors will also start to diminish because the fear is gone.

So that root, if you can attack that route and start to face the fears and not avoid them, then the fear, the theory is that they're eating disorder behaviors will also go with it.

Their perception may or may not be accurate, right?

So they could look in the mirror and they might see a very different body than most of the other people looking at them.

But they are going to develop their body and what they think.

And then it's going to kind of go from there to be very personalized.

So people were very shocked at how real it was for them.

What we want to do and what we're working on is personalizing treatment and making it really accessible to all types of people because eating disorders do not affect a certain type of person.

Eating disorders affect everyone.

According to Dr. Christina Ralph Millman, about 700 Kentuckians per year need emergency room treatment for eating disorders.

pre-COVID.

Since the pandemic, that number has nearly doubled.