PREreview of Maintenance Factors for Eating Disorder Symptoms Based on Ecological Momentary Assessment Studies: A Systematic Review
- Published
- DOI
- 10.5281/zenodo.17714858
- License
- CC BY 4.0
This research is an up to date systematic review of maintenance factors and eating disorder symptoms as measured by ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Most papers included in the review related to binge eating or loss of control (LOC) eating, with 179 included in total. Positive and negative affect were the main focus of the EMA questions in these studies, and the authors of this review highlight areas for more eating disorder specific processes being addressed in EMA studies. The review demonstrates how more research which tests the theoretical models of eating disorders against day-to-day mechanisms is needed to best utilise the EMA methodology and investigate treatments more effectively.
Major strengths
Updates existing literature review findings in the field using the more ecologically and temporally valid method of EMA.
Indicates a distinction between positive and negative affect in their association with different eating disorder symptoms, providing a target for future study focus depending on symptoms of interest.
Highlights a lack of contextual factors included in EMA data collection which would add variables of interest to mechanism investigations.
Moderate issues
Cohen’s kappa is unreported for data extraction or quality but it is for other measures. Transparency about the selection process for data going into this meta-analysis is important in understanding the findings, and this can be calculated and reported alongside the other Cohen’s kappa scores.
Minor issues
More details of the risk of bias assessment would help an understanding of how the studies were selected on quality. For instance, some indication of why existing tools like ROBIN-E weren’t used.
Cohen's kappa for title and abstract screening is low, and authors could explain why there might be low interrater reliability here.
No mention of missing data in other studies.
Reporting using the ‘SWiM’ – Synthesis Without Meta-Analysis – guidelines may bolster the claims made about the studies included in this systematic review.
Indicating how the methods used map onto Cochrane standards would help to contextualise the findings.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The authors declare that they did not use generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.