In order to assess the relationship of personality disorder and eating disorder outcome 30 eating disordered patients were followed up 4–5 years after taking part in a study examining the prevalence of personality disorders in eating disordered individuals. Subjects with personality disorders did not differ from those without personality disorders in the amount of symptomatic change over time, although their psychopathology generally remained more severe. The relationship of personality disorder and clinical outcome ratings varied depending on the personality measure. SCID‐II personality disorder diagnoses were not significantly associated with outcome ratings, but were related to a greater likelihood to be hospitalized and treated with psychotropic medications. Results with a new personality measure, the Wisconsin Personality Inventory, did display an association between personality disturbance and eating disorder outcome ratings and also suggested that borderline personality was a significant predictor of outcome. © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The authors interviewed 46 eating‐disordered individuals with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM‐III‐R Personality Disorders (SCID‐II) to assess the prevalence of personality disorders in four eating disorder subtypes. The findings suggest that eating disorder subtypes vary in prevalence of concurrent personality disorder diagnoses. Obsessive‐compulsive personality disorder was common in restricting anorexics, but not bulimic anorexics. Normal‐weight bulimia was associated with histrionic personality disorder. Regardless of eating‐disorder subtype, self‐reported depression was highest in individuals meeting criteria for borderline and dependent personality disorder.

Thirty normal-weight female bulimics were followed up 2-5 years following hospital admission using semistructured interviews and psychometric measures. Inasmuch as bulimia was only recently designated a distinct disorder, questions have emerged with regard to its clinical course and diagnostic validity. Results of this investigation suggest that bulimia displays a chronic but tractable course in that the majority of the patients continued to report bulimic behaviors at follow-up but the symptom intensity was greatly reduced from admission. The characterization of three bulimic outcome groups suggests that the outcome pattern of this disorder is heterogeneous, with some patients becoming symptom-free and others remaining severely afflicted. The durability of the symptoms and the failure of new psychiatric syndromes to emerge in the follow-up period is evidence that bulimia is a distinct diagnostic entity and not a variant of another underlying condition. The methodologic limitations of this study are addressed.

The authors compared eating‐disordered patients with borderline personality disorder to those patients with other personality disorders or none at all. Borderline subjects differed from other personality disorders in several ways; most notably their histories of sexual abuse, self‐mutilation, suicide gestures, and perceived hostile parental relationships. Borderline subjects failed to differ from other personality‐disordered subjects in eating attitudes and showed only limited differences in eating symptoms. The results are discussed also in terms of their support for Benjamin's theory of borderline personality.

Recent studies have suggested that subtypes of eating-disordered persons differ in their perceptions of their family environments. This study used Benjamin's (1983) Structural Analysis of Social Behavior to examine how depressed mood influenced eating-disordered subjects' ratings of their parental relationships. The results indicated that when level of mood disturbance was statistically controlled, there were no significant differences in parent ratings among restricting anorexics, bulimic-anorexics, bulimics, and normal control subjects. The results are discussed in terms of the possible relations of mood, eating disorder, and perception of family relationships.