People with eating disorders likely to die earlier, study shows

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Anorexia increases apatient's risk of death fivefold, and people with bulimia or another nonspecified eating disorder also face an increased risk of death -- about twice as likely to die as people without those disorders, a study said.
The cause of deaths wasn't always clear, but among anorexics who died, one in five was a suicide. The other deaths were attributed to theeating disorders' brutal effects on the body over time, researchers wrote in Archives of General Psychiatry.
"Of course, eating disorders have serious physical consequences," said lead author Jon Arcelus, of Loughborough University in the UK.
"The study could not identify how people died, but there is no doubt that the reasons behind this are related to the physical problems of the illness," he told Reuters Health in an email.
His group carried out a meta-analysis of 36 studies published between 1966 and 2010, which included 17,000 people with an eating disorder of whom 755 died.

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