Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Complications
By Mayo Clinic staffAnorexia can have numerous complications. At its most severe, it can be fatal. Anorexia has one of the higher death rates among all mental illnesses, around 5 percent but perhaps even higher than that. Death may occur suddenly — even when someone is not severely underweight. This may result from abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias) or electrolyte imbalances.
Complications of anorexia include:
- Death
- Anemia
- Heart problems, such as mitral valve prolapse, abnormal heart rhythms and heart failure
- Bone loss, increasing risk of fractures later in life
- Lung problems resembling emphysema
- In females, absence of a period
- In males, decreased testosterone
- Gastrointestinal problems, such as constipation, bloating or nausea
- Electrolyte abnormalities, such as low blood potassium, sodium and chloride
- Kidney problems
If a person with anorexia becomes severely malnourished, every organ in the body can sustain damage, including the brain, heart and kidneys. This damage may not be fully reversible, even when the anorexia is under control.
In addition to the host of physical complications, people with anorexia also commonly have other mental disorders as well. They may include:
- Depression
- Anxiety disorders
- Personality disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive disorders
- Drug abuse
