Rare diseases · Sign or symptom
Anorexia
HP:0002039
What it means
Lack of desire to eat (loss of appetite).
Please note that this term does not refer to the condition of anorexia nervosa, which is a disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. The term is considered more severe than "Poor appetite".
Rare diseases that can present with this108
Very common80–99%
20- Acute adrenal insufficiency
- Addison disease
- Arginine vasopressin deficiency
- Benign recurrent intrahepatic cholestasis
- Facial dysmorphism-anorexia-cachexia-eye and skin anomalies syndrome
- Familial pancreatic carcinoma
- Gaucher disease type 1
- Giant cell arteritis
- Hereditary folate malabsorption
- Holocarboxylase synthetase deficiency
- Infant botulism
- Late-onset isolated ACTH deficiency
- Methylmalonic acidemia with homocystinuria, type cblD
- Nipah virus disease
- Rabies
- Rheumatic fever
- Systemic lupus erythematosus
- Thiamine-responsive megaloblastic anemia syndrome
- Vitamin B12-unresponsive methylmalonic acidemia type mut-
- Whipple disease
Common30–79%
52- 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaric aciduria
- Acute promyelocytic leukemia
- Aggressive systemic mastocytosis
- AIDS wasting syndrome
- Alternating hemiplegia of childhood
- Arginine vasopressin resistance
- Bronchial neuroendocrine tumor
- Brucellosis
- Cat-scratch disease
- Classic Hodgkin lymphoma
- Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever
- Cronkhite-Canada syndrome
- Cryptogenic organizing pneumonia
- Fabry disease
- Familial glucocorticoid deficiency
- Gallbladder neuroendocrine tumor
- Glucagonoma
- GRFoma
- High altitude pulmonary edema
- Idiopathic catatonia
- IgG4-related retroperitoneal fibrosis
- Immunoglobulin A vasculitis
- Invasive meningococcal disease
- Isolated mesenteric vein thrombosis
- Japanese encephalitis
- Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease
- Laryngeal neuroendocrine tumor
- Lead poisoning
- Leptospirosis
- Mantle cell lymphoma
- Marburg hemorrhagic fever
- Mercury poisoning
- Neuroendocrine tumor of anal canal
- Neuroendocrine tumor of stomach
- Neuroendocrine tumor of the colon
- Neuroendocrine tumor of the rectum
- Ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency
- Plague
- Poliomyelitis
- Polymyositis
- Postinfectious vasculitis
- PPoma
- Primary hepatic neuroendocrine carcinoma
- Rift valley fever
- Severe disseminated cytomegalovirus infection in immunocompetent patients
- Shigellosis
- Somatostatinoma
- Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis spectrum
- Takayasu arteritis
- Tick-borne encephalitis
- VIPoma
- X-linked intellectual disability-psychosis-macroorchidism syndrome
The range is how often this sign appears among people diagnosed with each disease — it is not a probability of having any of them. Many of these signs also occur in common, non-rare conditions. A sign on this page is a conversation to have with a clinician, not a conclusion.
Part of the broader category
Also called: Deliberately not eating · Obsessive dieting · Refusing to eat
Tracking symptoms like this for someone? Eleplan keeps symptoms, diagnoses, medications and every specialist in one plan.
Start free with EleplanThis page uses the Human Phenotype Ontology (2026-06-23) — Human Phenotype Ontology Consortium, hpo.jax.org. Disease associations from Orphanet (INSERM), CC BY 4.0. Content is educational and is not medical advice.