Mental health visits more common at pediatric clinics during pandemic
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DENVER — Mental health visits to pediatric clinics — including for eating disorders, depression and bipolar disorders — were more common during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found.
The findings were presented by Jane C. Bittner Gould, MPH, CPH, a senior project manager at Boston Children's Hospital, at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting.
“At the onset of the pandemic, studies started coming out describing the mental health impact of the pandemic, mostly on adults, including things like increased stress, anxiety, depression,” Gould said. “But we noticed that there were a lot of studies presenting data from our emergency department visits and hospitalizations, and there was this lack of primary care data, especially in pediatrics.”
Gould and colleagues examined the impact of the pandemic on pediatric primary care for seven mental health categories using electronic health record data from a pre-pandemic period, lasting from January 2019 to February 2020; an emergency pandemic period from March 2020 to May 2020; and a pandemic period from June 2020 to September 2021.
They included alcohol and substance use disorders, anxiety disorders, ADHD, behavior disorders, depressive and bipolar disorders (BPDs), eating disorders; and stress/trauma disorders.
The researchers found a significant increase in slope (P < 0.001) for eating disorder visits, with the average visit rate nearly doubling from 9.3 visits per 1,000 patients per year in the pre-pandemic period to 18.3 visits per 1,000 patients per year in the pandemic period. A significant increase in slope (P < .001) was also observed for depressive and BPD visits, with the average visit raising from 65.3 in the pre-pandemic period to 94 in the pandemic period.
Decreases, meanwhile, in both level and slope (both P < .001) were observed for alcohol and substance use disorder visits, where the average visit rate having decreased from 5.8 in the pre-pandemic period to 5.5 in the pandemic period.
The results, Gould said, revealed an increased burden of mental health care provision in the primary care office since the start of the pandemic.