Eating disorders kill roughly 10,200 people per year in the United States, making them the second deadliest mental illness after opioid addiction. That works out to about one death every 52 minutes. Globally, the true number is almost certainly higher than any official count suggests, because eating disorders are routinely left off death certificates.
Annual Deaths in the United States
The figure of 10,200 annual deaths comes from the American Society for Nutrition and reflects deaths directly caused by or closely linked to eating disorders. To put that in perspective, it’s more than double the number of Americans killed each year by asthma, and roughly comparable to annual deaths from Parkinson’s disease.
This number encompasses all types of eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. It also includes deaths by suicide, which is a major contributor. People with eating disorders face significantly elevated suicide rates compared to the general population, particularly those with bulimia and other non-anorexia eating disorders.
Why the Real Number Is Likely Higher
One of the biggest problems in tracking eating disorder deaths is that they rarely appear on death certificates. When someone with anorexia dies because their heart stops, the certificate typically lists cardiac arrest or organ failure as the cause. When someone with bulimia dies from an electrolyte imbalance, the certificate may read “metabolic disturbance.” The eating disorder that drove the medical crisis often goes unrecorded.
This pattern has drawn attention in the UK Parliament, where lawmakers have described death certificates that list organ failure in otherwise healthy young people, with no mention of the eating disorder that caused the organ to fail. The effect is a systematic undercount. Families are left with documentation that doesn’t reflect what actually happened, and public health agencies can’t accurately measure how many lives eating disorders claim. Every estimate of eating disorder deaths, including the 10,200 figure for the US, should be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling.
Death Rates by Type of Eating Disorder
Anorexia nervosa carries the highest mortality risk of any eating disorder. In a long-term study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 7.5% of people with a lifetime history of anorexia had died by the end of the follow-up period. Their risk of dying from any cause was more than four times higher than what would be expected for people of the same age and sex in the general population.
Bulimia nervosa is close behind, with a crude mortality rate of 3.9% in a large clinical sample. That’s nearly identical to the 4.0% rate observed for anorexia in the same study. People with bulimia also had significantly elevated rates of death by suicide.
A category that often gets overlooked is “other specified” eating disorders, conditions that don’t fit neatly into anorexia or bulimia but are still serious. These had the highest crude mortality rate in one major study at 5.2%, and people in this group died at nearly twice the expected rate for their age and sex. Binge eating disorder, specifically, is harder to study because patients were historically referred to obesity clinics rather than eating disorder programs, leaving gaps in the data.
How Eating Disorders Kill
The medical complications that lead to death depend on the type of eating disorder, but they share a common thread: the body’s organs break down under sustained nutritional stress.
- Heart failure is the leading medical cause of death in anorexia. Severe calorie restriction causes the heart muscle to weaken and shrink. Dangerous heart rhythms can develop without warning.
- Electrolyte imbalances from purging (vomiting or laxative misuse) can cause the heart to stop suddenly. Potassium and sodium levels that drop too low disrupt the electrical signals that keep the heart beating.
- Organ damage to the kidneys, liver, and gastrointestinal system accumulates over time, particularly in people who cycle between restriction and bingeing.
- Suicide accounts for a substantial portion of eating disorder deaths. The psychological toll of living with an eating disorder, combined with high rates of co-occurring depression and anxiety, creates serious risk.
Who Is Most at Risk
Lower body weight at the time of assessment is one of the strongest predictors of dying from an eating disorder. This makes intuitive sense: the more severely malnourished someone is, the closer their body is to a point where vital organs can no longer function. But weight alone doesn’t tell the whole story. People at a normal or higher weight can still die from the cardiac and metabolic effects of purging behaviors.
Duration of illness matters too, though not in the way you might expect. Research shows that shorter follow-up periods (meaning people studied earlier in their illness) were actually associated with higher mortality risk. This likely reflects the danger of the acute phase of an eating disorder, when medical instability is at its peak and many people have not yet entered treatment. The early years of severe illness are particularly deadly.
Eating disorders affect people of every age, gender, race, and socioeconomic background, but mortality data is most robust for young women, who have historically made up the largest share of diagnosed cases. As diagnosis rates increase among men, older adults, and people of color, the death toll in these groups may prove to be higher than current statistics suggest.
Comparing Eating Disorders to Other Conditions
The designation of eating disorders as the second deadliest mental illness, behind only opioid use disorder, surprises many people. Depression and schizophrenia are more commonly discussed in the context of mortality, but eating disorders combine a high suicide rate with direct, progressive physical damage in a way few other psychiatric conditions do. A person with severe anorexia faces a risk of premature death that is four to six times higher than someone of the same age without the condition.
Despite this, eating disorders receive a fraction of the research funding allocated to other mental health conditions. The gap between how deadly these illnesses are and how much attention they receive from public health systems remains one of the most significant disparities in mental health care.