How to support adults with anorexia nervosa and autism: Qualitative study of clinical pathway case series.

Li et al. (2022) asked eating-disorder clinicians to describe what happens when an adult has both anorexia nervosa and autism. They collected a small case series and ran a qualitative analysis.

The team pulled out eight common trouble spots and four fixes the clinicians tried. The study did not test whether the fixes actually work.

The clinicians said the biggest headaches were rigid thinking, sensory issues around food, trouble reading body signals, and communication mismatches.

The four most-used adaptations were writing down each client’s preferred communication style, using plain language, giving extra processing time, and letting the client keep familiar routines.

Dababnah et al. (2025) reviewed hospital care and found ‘autism-friendly’ means flexible people, place, and time. Li’s four adaptations line up perfectly with that framework.

MPayne et al. (2020) warned that standard self-report tools can misread autistic adults. Li echoes this by telling clinicians to document preferred communication before trusting any self-report during eating-disorder work.

Hwang et al. (2019) showed autistic adults die at twice the rate of peers, often from untreated medical or mental-health conditions. Li’s paper gives front-line behavior staff a starting list of tweaks that could keep these clients engaged in life-saving treatment.

If you work with autistic adults, add a one-page ‘communication profile’ to your intake packet. Ask how they want to receive instructions, how much processing time they need, and what sensory cues help or hurt. Use that sheet to shape every session. Li’s team showed this tiny step is the adaptation clinicians reach for first, but no one has proven it works yet—so you can collect data and help fill that gap.