Orthorexia Nervosa and its Association with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder in a Sample of Egyptian Medical Students

Abstract Background To our knowledge, ON correlation with OCPD has been recently investigated, with many studies supporting a relationship between them, either being a risk factor or a common co-occurrence, which is considered an important contribution to the field of mental health and eating disorders research. Objective To measure the prevalence of Orthorexia Nervosa in a sample of Egyptian medical students, to measure the prevalence of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder in the study sample, to study the association between Orthorexia Nervosa and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder in the study sample, and to compare the prevalence of ON and OCPD among students in academic years and clinical years of medical school. Methods This study is a comparative observational cross-sectional study that included 427 medical students will be assessed for orthorexia nervosa symptoms and OCPD traits, conducted between February 2023 and august 2023 in Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. Results Orthorexia nervosa had prevalence of (8.7%), tendency (10.8%), with mean (18.1±7.2) which is consistent with prevalence in general population of (7%). There was no correlation between mean age, BMI, gender and orthorexia. The differences were statistically significant between third and fourth grade, yet DOS score was non-significantly higher in academic than clinical grades. OCPD prevalence was (42.2%) - (64.9%), which is higher than general population of (6.5%). OCPD results were significantly higher in academic than clinical grades. ON was significantly correlated to OCPD scores on both PDQ-4 and PID-5, and had significant positive correlations with rigid perfectionism, Intimacy avoidance, perseveration traits. Conclusion Our study showed that Orthorexia Nervosa is significantly higher in patients with obsessive compulsive personality disorder in comparison to negative participants. Furthermore, prevalence of orthorexia showed no correlation to either gender or BMI or study year of the patients. Obsessive compulsive personality disorder is significantly higher in academic than clinical grades of medical school.