How old was Karen Carpenter when she died of heart failure?
Karen Carpenter died February 4, 1983 of heart failure caused by chronic anorexia nervosa. She was thirty-two years old. She battled with it from 1975-1983 (when she died). She went to New York at the end of 1981 for a year of treatment by a psychiatrist but the damage had apparently been done. Plus, you can’t beat anorexia with an hour in a doctor’s office. She remained obsessed–or trapped–by it. She was an extreme case and she fought to over come the disease throughout the last two years of her life but she couldn’t or she just simply ran out of time. Her body couldn’t take anymore. She’d been starving herself for seven years, using laxatives, drinking water with lemon, taking dozens of thyroid pills daily, and even throwing up. Karen possessed every bit as much talent as Richard, however, hers was a talent that did not show at an early age like her brother’s. Her first musical interest was as a drummer and it wasn’t until later that her pure, natural vocal talent surfaced. A recor
