Pilot study employing heart rate variability biofeedback training to decrease anxiety in patients with eating disorders

Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback, a technique which encourages slow meditative breathing, was offered to 25 in-patients with various eating disorder diagnoses-anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. We found that this modality had no serious side effects, and was subjectively useful to most participants. An enhanced ability to generate highly coherent HRV patterns in patients with recent onset anorexia nervosa was observed. © 2014 Scolnick et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.