Austen, Emma, Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Matthew, McLean, Siân A., O’Gorman, Beth, Bishop, Katie, Jarman, Hannah K., Paxton, Susan J., Rodgers, Rachel F., Dang, An, Harris, Emily A., Angelopoulos, Felicity, Grey, Wesley, Sukunesan, Suku, Parker, Alexandra, Shatte, Adrian, Khanh-Dao Le, Long, and Griffiths, Scott (2026) Lessons learned from a randomised controlled trial of a digital intervention targeting eating disorder symptoms in cisgender sexual minoritized men. Journal of Eating Disorders. (In Press)

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Abstract

Background: There is an unmet need for evidence-based and accessible interventions designed to treat eating disorders in sexual minoritized men, given their heightened vulnerability to developing disordered eating. Digital interventions are a promising avenue for eating disorder treatment because of their accessibility and flexibility in delivery. Here, we present a randomised controlled trial of Seed, a 10-week treatment-focussed digital intervention for eating disorders, among sexual minoritized men.

Methods: Participants (N = 126 sexual minoritized men) with a binge-spectrum eating disorder diagnosis (e.g., bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder) were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: (1) a waitlist control (2) a personalised intervention, where participants received personalised content recommendations based on their individual symptom profile, or (3) a default intervention, in which participants received no personalised recommendations. Changes from baseline in eating disorder symptoms were evaluated via clinical interview and self-report at 10 week and 6 month follow up.

Results: Relative to the waitlist control and default conditions, participants in the personalised intervention condition reported significantly greater decreases in their global Eating Disorder Examination interview scores at post-intervention/10-week follow up. We did not observe any significant changes in self-reported eating disorder symptoms. Our results are tentative as we were underpowered to detect small-to-medium treatment effects.

Conclusions: Our study provides preliminary evidence for the efficacy of Seed for treating eating disorders in sexual minoritized men, particularly when personalised content recommendations are provided. However, future research must provide greater quality evidence through well-powered, more rigorous clinical trials.

Item ID:	93134
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2050-2974
Keywords:	eating disorders, digital intervention, mHealth, randomised controlled trial
Copyright Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	10 Aug 2026 05:28
FoR Codes:	46 INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES > 4601 Applied computing > 460102 Applications in health @ 50% 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5203 Clinical and health psychology > 520399 Clinical and health psychology not elsewhere classified @ 50%
SEO Codes:	22 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION SERVICES > 2204 Information systems, technologies and services > 220402 Applied computing @ 50% 20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200409 Mental health @ 50%
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