This paper aimed to locate and assess chronologically significant definitions and accounts of pica, to provide a fuller clinical description of a condition which, despite its current relevance, has received little detailed historical examination, and to give some consideration to the multiple aetiological theories which have been put forward. Some contemporary forms of pica have been well publicized: clay eating in Turkey, Iran, and the southern United States, starch eating in our northeastern. Extensive research on the history and terminology of eating disorders from the 16th to the 20th century suggests that, historically, pica was regarded as a symptom of other disorders rather than a separate entity. Pica is one of the most common eating disorders among individuals with autistic spectrum disorder and intellectual disabilities.

Pica in children, and feeding disorder in infancy and childhood, are incorporated with enuresis, encopresis, and feeding, movement and speech disorders in a separate “heterogeneous group of disorders”. However, in the Draft of ICD–10, only anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are listed under eating disorders. The incidence of pica in children and adolescents with developmental. Individual with pica are reported to consume foods such as clay, dirt, sand, stones, pebbles, hair, feces, lead, vinyl gloves, plastic, pencil erasers, ice, fingernails, paper, paint chips, coal, chalk, wood, plaster, light bulbs, needles, string, cigarette butts, and wire. In DSM–III–R, pica, with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and rumination disorder of infancy, is accorded the status of a separate eating disorder. It is the most commonly observed eating disorder in these clinical populations.

Pica syndrome list