Three clinical indicators of borderline personality disorder in anorexia nervosa: A pilot study

Co-occurrence of Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) is frequent (8%-40%) and associated with specificities that impact the treatment process. Lifetime history of suicide attempt (HAS), substance use disorder (SUD) and the binge-purging subtype (B-P) might be good markers of such comorbidity. We made the hypothesis that in patients with AN, the presence of HAS, SUD and B-P have sufficient predictive power to efficiently detect an associated BPD comorbidity.

After a case report analysis on a pilot sample of 119 patients with AN, we performed a cross-sectional analysis on a confirmatory sample of 84 patients with AN in a single center specialized in eating disorders systematically assessing HAS, SUD, B-P and BPD using the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview for DSM-5 and the Diagnostic Interview for Borderline (DIB-R).

B-P had a 100% negative predictive value, and the combination of SUD plus HAS had a 100% positive predictive value. On a quantitative level, B-P, HAS and SUD were independent explanatory factors of the DIB-R total score.

The main limitations were the low number of patients, the single center analyses, the potential overlapping of assessments and the fact that data were exclusively declarative. In this study, every patient with B-P, SUD and HAS had been diagnosed with BPD.