Women with anorexia, however, are more likely to have suicidal thoughts
than those with bulimia or other disorders, say Gabriella Milos, M.D.,
and colleagues at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Their
study appears in the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.
The researchers also found that most of the women in the study had other
psychiatric disorders besides an eating disorder, including depression,
drug or alcohol abuse or fearfulness or anxiety. Almost 84 percent of the
patients had at least one other psychiatric problem.
Milos and colleagues say the link between purging and suicidal attempts
might be due to a lack of impulse control, which would affect both behaviors.
The higher prevalence of suicidal thoughts among women with anorexia could
point to a different phenomenon, they say. Women in the study who reported
suicidal thoughts tended to be much younger when their eating disorder
appeared and were more fixated on their appearance and fearful of weight
gain than those without suicidal thoughts.
“Anorexia nervosa patients’ starvation is a form of chronic
self-harming behavior and continuously maintaining underweight generates
considerable distress,” Milos says.
The two-year study included 288 patients diagnosed with some form of eating
disorder. Twenty-six percent of the women said they had attempted suicide
at least once in the past, a rate than is four times higher than in the
general female population of Western states, the researchers say. Also,
about 26 percent of the patients said they were having current thoughts
about suicide.
Milos and colleagues acknowledge that they did not analyze information
on any treatment the women were receiving for their eating disorders, which
could have affected the rate of suicidal thoughts.
The study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and by
the Swiss Federal Department for Education and Science.
