Dr. Nicole Obeid is an applied developmental psychologist who is currently a Scientist and Lead of the Eating Disorder Research Lab with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. She is also an Associate Professor with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and the Past-President of the Eating Disorder Association of Canada (EDAC). She has worked in the field of eating disorders for over almost two decades with interests in etiological risk and maintenance factors of eating disorders, treatment studies of youth with severe eating disorders, health systems research with a focus on early intervention, and applying patient-oriented research mechanisms to guide this work.
Related News
Research Projects
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A framework for conceptualizing early intervention for eating disorders
01/03/2023
Attending to these recommendations would transform ED service provision and allow early intervention to be a standard part of best practice care. Progress in other areas of psychiatry shows that this is possible.
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Appearance satisfaction mediates the relationship between recreational screen time and depressive symptoms in adolescents
18/07/2022
Recreational screen time, including activities that involve using a screen for leisure (i.e., computer, videogames, television; U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2018) is a popular and predominantly sedentary pastime. Epidemiological data show that many adolescents exceed the <2-hr daily screen time recommendation based on the Canadian 24-hr Movement Guidelines for Children and Youth (Tremblay et al., 2016) by more than 6 hr each day (Leatherdale & Harvey, 2015). As screen time activities exert increased influence on adolescents' lives, it has spurred researchers to examine the implications of their use. High levels of recreational screen time activities have been associated with a host of physical health issues, such as sleep problems (Cabre-Riera et al., 2019), health risk behaviors, (i.e., illicit drug use; Rücker, Akre, Berchtold,& Suris, 2015) and risk of overweight status and obesity (Fang, Mu, Liu, & He, 2019). Alarmingly, one additional hour of daily screen time has been linked to 172 additional servings of beverages high in sugar and 368 additional servings of ‘unhealthy’ snack foods each year among adolescents (Hicks, Jillcot Pitts, Lazorick, Fang, & Rafferty, 2019).
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Examining the Bidirectional Association Between Body Esteem and Body Mass Index During Adolescence
01/11/2021
The decreasing trajectory of body esteem over time suggests the need for prevention efforts to improve body esteem throughout adolescence.
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Coping in adolescents: A mediator between stress and disordered eating
16/06/2021
Overall, the findings from this study are among the first to demonstrate significant mediation relationships between stress (both negative life events and perceived stress) and ED symptomatology for emotion-oriented coping in both male and female adolescents. These findings suggest that using emotion-oriented coping in response to real or perceived stress increases the risk for ED symptomatology across all adolescents. These findings suggest that intervention or prevention efforts aimed at teaching adolescents how to tackle or cope with a problem by aiming to address the stressor itself (i.e. task-oriented coping) versus trying to escape the emotion that accompanies it may have a protective effect against emerging ED symptomatology, and likely full-blown eating disorders in the face of stress during a vulnerable developmental period.
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The impact of COVID-19 on adolescents with eating disorders: a cohort study
04/06/2021
Further research is required to better understand the impact of the pandemic on the clinical course and outcomes of EDs in adolescents.