Ricerc@Sapienza

Attitudes toward the different aspects of body image play relevant role in “maniacal obsession” about healthy and proper food among female and male students.

Aim: The aim of this literature review was to identify the tools developed and used to assess orthorexia nervosa (ON). Methods: A systematic search was executed in PubMed, Biomed Central, and PsycINFO. The final list included 70 articles that were critically analyzed. Results: A total of six tools were reported to assess ON: the BOT, the ORTO-15, the EHQ, the DOS, the BOS, and the TOS. The tools were based upon different conceptualizations of ON and of its diagnostic criteria.

In some cases, detrimental consequences on health are generated by self-imposed dietary rules intended to promote health. The pursuit of an "extreme dietary purity" due to an exaggerated focus on food may lead to a disordered eating behavior called "orthorexia nervosa" (ON). ON raises a growing interest, but at present there is no universally shared definition of ON, the diagnostic criteria are under debate, and the psychometric instruments used in the literature revealed some flaws.

Background: Orthorexia nervosa has attracted significant attention in the field, however, alongside increasing knowledge, more and more gaps are being identified. One of the fundamental problems concerns measurement of orthorexia nervosa. The most commonly used self-report measure, the ORTO-15, demonstrated an unstable factorial structure across different populations. Therefore, one might question whether the knowledge obtained from past research using ORTO-15 is valid or not.