This nationwide study examined mortality in people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in Aotearoa New Zealand. It included 10,059 people with a diagnosis recorded in publicly funded secondary services between 2009 and 2021. The standardised mortality ratio (SMR) compared their deaths over 63,849 person-years with age- and gender-standardised general population rates. There were 639 deaths, one third from suicide, and the all-cause SMR was 5.78 (95% CI 5.34-6.24). The suicide SMR was 29.0 and the non-suicide SMR 4.11, and 84% had another mental health diagnosis. The abstract does not report the study's limitations.
Why it is interesting: Most mortality data in borderline personality disorder come from Europe and North America and focus on suicide. Here non-suicide deaths were also four times the general population rate and made up two thirds of all deaths.
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