a comparative study of the prevalence and intensity of borderline personality features in male and female high school students in fars province

Background: borderline personality disorder (bpd) is the most important and prevalent entity, with a population prevalence rate of 1.4 to 5.9. objectives: although, the epidemiology of bpd is insufficiently known, our objective was to compare the cross-sectional prevalence and intensity of this disorder among high school male and female students. patients and methods: the study comprised of 1265 male/female high school students in educational year 2013 to 2014 in fars province, selected by multi-stage random sampling. data collection was done using borderline personality features scale-children. the descriptive statistics, chi-square test, student’s independent t-test, and multivariate analysis of variance were used for data analysis. results: the prevalence rate of borderline personality features in whole sample is 26.6%, with 34.2% in females and 17.4% in males there was a significant difference between males and females (p < 0.001, χ2 = 6.72). regarding total scores and related four subscales, significant differences were found between the prevalence of borderline personality features in males and females; self-harm and negative relationship subscales were higher in male students. conclusions: the results showed that there was a considerable gap between the real prevalence of borderline personality disorder in the general population and its prevalence in clinical records. also, the prevalence of borderline personality disorder in non-clinical adolescent’s population is higher than its prevalence in adult population. it shows the necessity for more specific investigations and designing predictive plans.