"The findings suggest that childhood obsessive-compulsive personality traits are important risk factors for later development of eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa. Furthermore, the findings suggest that childhood perfectionism and rigidity may offer a more specific and homogenous phenotypic determination for genetic studies. Further studies are needed to determine whether these traits are specific for eating disorders or are also linked to other psychiatric disorders, such as depression or OCD. Personality traits may also act as maintaining factors and as such may have an important influence on the prognosis of the disorder. Studies of people who have recovered from an eating disorder would be needed to explore the influence of childhood obsessive-compulsive-personality traits on the length of illness and its severity. Female subjects were included in this study because the prevalence of eating disorders is approximately nine times higher in women than in men. However, further studies that include male subjects are needed to better understand the role of the assessed traits. To our knowledge, the interview scale described here is the first to measure these personality trait risk factors in a broad and comprehensive way. The finding that perfectionism and rigidity represent strong risk factors suggests that these items might also be also used to identify people at high risk for developing an eating disorder later in life. Prospective studies are needed to replicate these findings."