Exercise dependence among ISSEPS students

The choice of a sports career path may be deliberate but may sometimes be imposed by an addiction to physical exercise (DEP) or serve as a socially valued setting for eating disorders (ADD).The objective of this study was to investigate the risk of EDD among students of the Institut Supérieur de Sport et d''Education Physique de Sfax (ISSEPS) to estimate the frequency of EDD among them to determine the links between EDD and EDD and to identify subjects at risk of developing such disorders. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 158 ISSEPS students during October and November 2016. We used the EDS-R scale for PED assessment and the EAT-26 scale for ACT screening.The average age of the study participants was 21.7 years. The prevalence of PED in our series was 8.9%. The prevalence of AUD was 42.4%. These two addictive behaviors were significantly correlated in categorical and dimensional analysis.Our study shows that PED is quite common among ISSEPS students and is strongly linked to AUD whether it is the cause or the consequence.