Current and emerging drugs treatment for night eating syndrome

Abstract

Introduction

The night eating syndrome (NES) is a categorized in the diagnostic and statistic manual (DSM-5) as an “Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder” and it is characterized by a reduced feeding during the day, evening hyperphagia accompagned by frequent nocturnal awakenings associated with conscious episodes of compulsive ingestion of food and abnormal circadian rhythms of food and other neuroendocrine factors. Frequently it is associated with obesity and depressed mood.

Objectives

The purpose of this review is to investigate the state of art concerning the psychopharmacological treatment of NES.

Methods

A Medline enquiry of published articles from 2005 to October 2015 was performed using the following keywords: “NES, pharmacological treatment, SSRI, antidepressants, antipsychotic, sertraline, citalopram, escitalopram, duloxetine, venlafaxine, paroxetine, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, topiramate”. Reviews, single case studies and RCT were also analyzed.

Results

Only few studies met the selection criteria. A recent 8-week double-blind placebo controlled study, in 34 patients with NES, has confirmed the efficacy of sertraline. Sertraline was associated with significantly greater improvement than placebo in overall symptomatology.

Conclusions

SSRIs should be considered the drug of choice for the treatment of NES not only because of evidence in the literature but also since they display the best pharmacological profiles with fewer adverse events. More evidence of efficacy is shown for some SSRIs such us paroxetine, fluvoxamine and especially sertraline. Topiramate should be reserved for cases resistant to treatment with SSRIs.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.