Social isolation, economic stress, loss of loved ones and other difficulties experienced during the pandemic have contributed to the rise in mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
But can having COVID-19 increase the risk of developing mental health issues? A large new study suggests that it is possible.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ, analyzed the records of nearly 154,000 COVID patients in the Veterans Health Administration system and compared their experience over the past year. followed their recovery from the initial infection with that of a similar group of people who did not contract the virus.
The study only included patients who had not received any mental health diagnosis or treatment for at least two years before being infected with the coronavirus, allowing researchers to focus on diagnoses and treatments. psychiatric disorders that occurred following infection with the coronavirus.
According to the study, people who were infected with COVID were 39% more likely to be diagnosed with depression and 35% more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety in the months following infection than people who did not. have not been infected with COVID during the same period. COVID patients were 38% more likely to be diagnosed with stress and adjustment disorders and 41% more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders than uninfected people.
“There seems to be a clear excess of mental health diagnoses in the months following COVID,” said Paul Harrison, professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. He said the findings echoed the emerging picture from other research, including a 2021 study he co-authored, and “it reinforces the thesis that there is something regarding COVID that puts people at increased risk for common mental disorders.”
According to the study, following receiving COVID, people were 55% more likely to take antidepressants and 65% more likely to take anti-anxiety medication than their contemporaries without COVID.
Overall, more than 18% of COVID patients received a diagnosis or prescription for a neuropsychiatric problem within a year, compared to less than 12% of the non-COVID group. According to the study, COVID patients were 60% more likely to fall into these categories than people who did not.
The study found that patients hospitalized with COVID infection were more likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those with milder coronavirus infections. But people with mild infection initial infections were still at higher risk than people without COVID.
“Some people still claim that maybe people are depressed because they had to go to hospital and spent a week in intensive care,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Ziyad. Al-Aly, head of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and clinical public health researcher at Washington University in St. the risk was lower but certainly significant. And most people don’t need to be hospitalized, so that’s really the group that’s representative of most people with COVID-19. »
The team also compared the mental health diagnoses of people hospitalized for COVID with those of people hospitalized for any other reason. “Whether people were hospitalized for a heart attack, chemotherapy or any other condition, the COVID-19 group was at higher risk,” Al-Aly said.
The study looked at the electronic medical records of 153,848 adults who tested positive for coronavirus between March 1, 2020 and January 15, 2021, and who survived for at least 30 days. As this was the start of the pandemic, very few were vaccinated prior to infection. Patients were followed until November 30, 2021. Mr Al-Aly said his team planned to analyze whether subsequent vaccination changed people’s mental health symptoms, as well as other post-COVID medical conditions that the group studied.
COVID patients were compared to more than 5.6 million veterans system patients who did not test positive for coronavirus and more than 5.8 million pre-pandemic patients, in the period from March 2018 to January 2019. In an attempt to measure the effect of COVID-19 on mental health compared to that of another virus, the patients were also compared to approximately 72,000 patients who had the flu during the two and a half years preceding the pandemic. (Al-Aly said there were too few flu cases during the pandemic to provide a contemporary comparison).
The researchers tried to minimize the differences between the groups by adjusting for many demographic characteristics, pre-outbreak health status, nursing home residence and other variables.
Within a year of being infected, patients in the COVID group had higher rates of mental health diagnoses than the other groups.
“It’s not really surprising to me because we’ve seen this,” said Dr. Maura Boldrini, associate professor of psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. “I’m struck by how many times we’ve seen people with these new symptoms without a psychiatric history. »
Most of the veterans in the study were male, three-quarters were white, and their average age was 63, so the results may not apply to all Americans. Nevertheless, the study included more than 1.3 million women and 2.1 million black patients, and Al-Aly said “we found evidence of an increased risk regardless of age, race or sex. »
There may be several reasons for the rise in mental health diagnoses, according to Al-Aly and outside experts. Ms Boldrini said she believed the symptoms were most likely influenced by biological factors and the influence of the environment. psychological stress associated with having a disease.
“There is no single analysis that tells the whole story,” Al-Aly said. “Perhaps all of us or most of us have experienced some kind of emotional distress or mental health stress or a problem sleeping,” he added. “But people with COVID have done worse.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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