Doctors have long suspected that childhood sexual abuse is a common theme in the back ground of women with bulimia nervosa. This hypothesis has come under much scrutiny and as a result, has been tested and re-tested time and again. Studies have had findings stating everything from, there is no evidentiary support for this hypothesis, to there is a non-specific correlation and yet other studies claim that childhood sexual abuse is a direct risk factor for bulimia nervosa. More recent articles seem to point toward some type of relationship between bulimia nervosa and childhood sexual abuse. The process of finding this information takes some digging. Many search engines (including Medscape, Proquest, and Google’s scholarly article search) were used. Much of the research in this area seems to have been done approximately ten years ago and therefore was not current enough to be used. These older studies also have a common theme in that they tended to lean toward the opinion that bulimia nervosa and childhood sexual abuse are not directly related. The more current articles on this subject agree more with the school of though that bulimia nervosa is closely related to childhood sexual abuse. According to Pearlstein (2002) “Many older studies involved clinical rather than community samples” (p. 5) which may shed some light on why their results showed little to no correlation with bulimia nervosa and childhood sexual abuse. If there is a relationship between childhood sexual abuse and bulimia nervosa, how does the abuse predispose one to becoming bulimic? One theory by Smyth, Heron, Wonderlich, Crosby, and Thompson (2008) suggests “bulimics release a chemical during stressful events that impacts appetite.” (Schleipfer, 2008) Other theories simply suggest that trauma of any kind is more likely to cause some kind of psychological disturbances which may lead to the