It looks like this is an international issue. We are seeing it regularly in the UK, perhaps better reported now because it has come to be seen as newsworthy. Missing Millions France have reported there are regularly cases there where young primarily women with very severe ME are refused alternative feeding leading to malnutrition and dehydration and worse. My memory is not brilliant but haven’t there been a couple of cases in Scandinavia over the last few years?
Is that we don’t hear of it in more countries because it is not being recognised and reported? How many deaths are wrongly hidden/lost under an assumption of anorexia?
Presumably once malnutrition and dehydration have set in, unless the patient is carefully listened to, differential diagnosis becomes difficult as which presenting symptoms relate to any underlying condition and which to nutritional status.
From a very brief web search for example in the USA there are over 10,000 deaths a year attributed to anorexia nervosa (Deloitte Access Economics.
The Social and Economic Cost of Eating Disorders in the United States of America: A Report for the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders and the Academy for Eating Disorders.June 2020. Available at:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/striped/report-economic-costs-of-eating-disorders/). Given how fraught the situation relating to such deaths and the management of anorexia can be anyway, it is conceivable that other missed conditions particularly in young women just get subsumed.
As we have seen here in the UK not even highly motivated and formed media savvy families are enough to force appropriate alternative feeding being investigated and possibly/probably preventing death.
