NEW YORK, Jul 23 (Reuters Health) -- Women with focused, goal-oriented personalities are most likely to make a rapid, sustained recovery from bulimia after entering psychotherapy, according to researchers.

"Many of these women reported a rapid decrease in binging and purging after their first contact with the treatment program," report a team of US and New Zealand researchers led by Dr. Cynthia Bulik of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Their findings are published in the July issue of the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

The authors examined the outcomes of 98 bulimic women who underwent at least 8 sessions of cognitive behavioral psychological therapy. In this type of treatment, patients are taught how to recognize and change the underlying motivations and behaviors leading to their illness.

Nineteen of the 98 women "exhibited complete abstinence from binging and purging after only eight sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy," according to the authors. These patients remained free of bulimic symptoms for over a year of follow-up.

The investigators compared the clinical symptoms and personality traits of these patients with those of patients with less favorable responses to treatment.

They found that women with "self-directed" personalities were much more likely to recover quickly from bulimia than other patients were. According to the researchers, self-directed individuals display traits such as an "acceptance of responsibility for one's own choices, identification of... goals and purposes, development of skills and confidence in solving problems; (and) self-acceptance." Each of these personality traits should "greatly facilitate" therapeutic recovery from bulimia, the researchers conclude.

Bulik and her colleagues also found that women whose symptoms were relatively mild at the beginning of therapy (i.e., binging and purging 5 times a week versus 11 times per week) stood the best chance of a full and speedy recovery. On the other hand, factors such as patient weight, age, age at time of onset of illness, and duration of illness had no significant impact on patient recovery.

SOURCE: International Journal of Eating Disorders 1999;26:137-144.

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