Alexandra Pattillo

Alexandra Pattillo is a freelance journalist who covers health, science and wellness for major international outlets. Her work for the BBC and other publications focuses on the intersection of emerging medical and psychological research with the everyday experiences of patients, families and clinicians. She distinguishes herself by pairing rigorous reporting on new studies with intimate accounts of how health conditions and treatments shape people’s lives, especially in under-examined areas of mental health and women’s health.

Eating disorders and women’s health

In her feature on eating disorders during pregnancy, Pattillo investigates how longstanding struggles with food and body image collide with the physical and emotional demands of pregnancy. She foregrounds women who describe feeling trapped between pressure to maintain a healthy pregnancy and the compulsion to restrict or control food, using their narratives to show how clinical guidance often fails to account for these realities.

The piece situates these stories within current research on perinatal mental health and eating disorders, drawing on expert interviews to explain why these conditions can be missed in prenatal care and how this affects outcomes for parents and babies.

Across her coverage of eating disorders, she reports on emerging treatment approaches, including early investigations of psychedelic-assisted therapy for anorexia, explaining both the promise of symptom relief and the limits of small, preliminary trials. Her questions to researchers emphasise study design, safety concerns and relapse risk, reflecting a sustained interest in therapies for people whose conditions have proved resistant to conventional care.

Brain health, sport and risk

Pattillo’s reporting on children’s American football and brain health examines whether repeated head impacts in youth sports can put young players at risk for long-term neurological problems. She breaks down complex findings from neuroimaging and epidemiological studies into clear explanations of what scientists know and what remains uncertain about concussion, sub-concussive hits and chronic brain injury.

The article balances interviews with researchers and coaches with broader questions about how parents and leagues should weigh enthusiasm for contact sports against emerging evidence of harm. This focus on translating developing science into practical risk decisions mirrors her broader attention to how health research informs everyday choices, from exercise habits to stress management.

Attention, habits and behavioral science

In her feature for the BBC on friction-maxxing, Pattillo explores the idea that adding small obstacles to technology use and daily routines can protect focus and well-being in an attention-saturated environment. She traces how behavioral science concepts of friction and choice architecture underpin popular advice to delete apps, turn off notifications or make distractions less convenient, and tests whether these strategies have evidence behind them. Her earlier reporting for digital science and health outlets looks at similar intersections of behavior, physiology and performance, from whether mindfulness practices produce measurable changes in the brain to whether experimental therapies can imitate the metabolic effects of exercise. She often investigates viral wellness trends such as dry scooping pre-workout supplements, consulting experts to differentiate marketing claims from documented risks and benefits.

Health gaps and lived experience

Through the Health Gap column, Pattillo contributes to the BBC’s examination of how social, economic and systemic factors create disparities in access to care and health outcomes. Her pregnancy eating disorder feature fits this frame by showing how stigma around both mental illness and motherhood leaves many patients without adequate screening, support or specialised treatment. Work elsewhere on long-term symptoms after Covid-19, including loss of smell in young people, similarly foregrounds the lived consequences of conditions that can be minimised or misunderstood by healthcare systems. Across outlets, she returns to stories where patients’ experiences do not align neatly with diagnostic categories or standard pathways, using in-depth interviews and current research to illuminate gaps in care.

Her portfolio includes more than 500 articles for publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, Outside, The Daily Beast, CNN, Inverse, Women’s Running, Body+Soul and MindBodyGreen, underscoring both range and depth across health and science topics. This consistent attention to overlooked conditions and populations shapes coverage that is scientifically literate and attuned to the human dimensions of health policy and clinical practice.