I should point out that those are older statistics and that they are for young adults or a study in adults. We think things are starting to get better for young people and for pediatric eating disorders because of the recognition of the need to involve families.
An exciting development you will have probably have heard of is the fact that family-based therapy, also known as Maudsley family therapy, has been studied enough for us to recognize that it is effective in young people and that it is the recommended treatment for restrictive adolescent eating disorders. The exciting thing about it is that it's effective and it's not particularly expensive, compared to in-patient hospitalization. It's an outpatient treatment.
Our problem at CHEO was that we were funded for an in-patient program and a day treatment program, but we never received funding for an outpatient program. The recommended treatment is outpatient family therapy. We've struggled with the fact that we don't have outpatient therapists, but if we just treated patients in hospital who were medically unstable and we discharged them, they wouldn't get better. There are no community resources to do this. Our team ended up doing it and following them. The program evaluation and outcomes are very positive and effective, but as a result we got very backed up with a one-year waiting list and had to close our program and try to figure out what to do about all of this.