People suffering symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have an increased likelihood of developing a food addiction, particularly when these symptoms occur at an earlier age.

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that can occur after a traumatic experience or witnessing a life-threatening event, such as military combat, physical or sexual assault, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, and so forth. While most survivors of trauma return to normal after a given amount of time, some people will suffer stress reactions that either never go away, or worsen over time.

Study author Susan M. Mason, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues looked at data from the Nurses’ Health Study II to identify the link between PTSD symptoms and food addiction. They defined food addiction as eating when not hungry four or more times a week, needing to eat more food to reduce stress, and suffering physical withdrawal symptoms when cutting down on specific foods.

Among the 49,408 women that were studied, 81 percent of them reported experiencing at least one traumatic event. On average, women with PTSD reported that their first symptom occurred around the age of 30. The prevalence of food addiction was reported at 8 percent, with almost 18 percent among women with six to seven symptoms of PTSD.

“Our findings are relevant to ongoing questions regarding the mechanisms behind observed associations between PTSD and obesity, and they provide support for hypotheses suggesting that association between PTSD and obesity might partly originate in maladaptive coping and use of food to blunt trauma-associated distress. If replicated longitudinally, these results may have implications for both the etiology of obesity and for treatment of individuals with PTSD,” said Mason in a statement.