TOPLINE

Adolescents who owned a smartphone at the age of 12 years were more likely to report symptoms of eating disorders at that age and 2 years later compared with those who did not own a smartphone at the age of 12 years.

METHODOLOGY

• Researchers analyzed data from an ongoing longitudinal study to assess whether owning a smartphone was associated with eating disorder symptoms in adolescents.
• They included 8957 US adolescents (51.8% boys) across multiple sites, assessed at ages of 12 and 14 years.
• Parents and caregivers reported whether their child owned a personal cellphone, the kind of phone, and the age when the child first received it.
• Adolescents completed an interview to report eating disorder symptoms: binge eating, worry about gaining weight, inappropriate compensatory behaviors to avoid gaining weight, and self-worth linked to weight.

TAKEAWAY

• Overall, 69.5% of adolescents owned a smartphone at the age of 12 years.
• At the age of 12 years, smartphone owners vs nonowners had a 1.61-fold higher prevalence of binge eating, 2.21-fold higher prevalence of linking self-worth to weight, and 1.36-fold higher prevalence of any eating disorder symptom (P < .05 for all).
• Owning a smartphone at the age of 12 years was associated with a higher risk at the age of 14 years for binge eating (1.67-fold), of using inappropriate compensatory behaviors to avoid weight gain (1.50-fold), of linking self-worth to weight (2.03-fold), and for any eating disorder symptom (1.49-fold; P ≤ .01 for all).
• Ownership of a smartphone was not significantly associated with worry about weight gain overall, although girls who owned a smartphone reported more of such worries than boys at age 12.

IN PRACTICE

"Parents and caregivers may benefit from guidance around adolescent smartphone ownership, including consideration of age-appropriate limits and supervision of early device access," the researchers wrote.

SOURCE

The study was led by Jason M. Nagata, MD, MSc, of the University of California, San Francisco. It was published online on September 25 in JAMA Network Open.

LIMITATIONS

Adolescents reported their symptoms on their own, which may have biased the responses. Researchers did not assess the influence of bullying or neurodevelopmental conditions. Ownership of smartphones was not randomly assigned; thus, researchers could not establish that smartphones caused the symptoms.

DISCLOSURES

The study received support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The data source study received support from multiple organizations, including the NIH and additional federal partners. Details are available in the original article. The authors did not report any conflicts of interest.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.