Causes and Symptoms There are other causes for autophagia, which are not limited to having psychiatric disorders.
Rat-Based Autophagia Research Using an inanition experiment, having the lack of nourishment, albino rats were used to find the comparative qualities between themselves and autophagia tendencies (Nash, 1940). Some cases in autophagia have been linked to malnutrition and psychological distress (Hanson, 2014). The rats results concluded that more than one factor drives the need to practice autophagia; they needed to be both injured and malnutrition in order to consider the need to eat the area of where the wound was inflicted. Though, they would generally focus on one area, eating either the fore paws or the tail, expect for the extreme cases that would eat a significant amount of both (Nash, 1940). Although, the connection between autophagia is rats and humans is still lacking the sufficient evidence and research (Atai, Ahmed & Pearce, 2010). To some certain extent it demonstrates the human aspects to containing more than one drive in order to indulge in self-cannibalism, as shown by almost every reported case.
Link to Disorders Autophagia is more commonly linked to other disorders as a method to understand the basis of the individual patient’s actions, though is does create difficulty in having a basis on which to begin…show more content… In the case of a twenty-three year-old man, whom lost sensation on his pinkie, due to a sensory ulnar nerve deficit from a previous self-inflicted, he chewed his finger to see if he had regained any form of sensation. Afterwards he mutilated his finger another time before being treated as a self-mutilator (Lo & Schreuder, 2014). Although, he did not fully commit self-cannibalistic actions, he demonstrates the incapability to feel a desire to stop when inflicting
