Eating Disorders Skyrocket During Pandemic: Study

Children's National Hospital in Washington. Courtesy of Children's National Hospital
By Zachary Stieber, Senior Reporter
Updated:
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Eating disorders have jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at the numbers of inpatient admissions and outpatient visits for eating disorders such as bulimia and binge eating disorder before the pandemic started at 14 hospital-based sites that are part of the National Eating Disorder Quality Improvement Collaborative, and one additional nonhospital-based site. They compared the numbers to admissions and visits that came after the pandemic started in early 2020.

Inpatient admissions for disorders jumped starting in mid-2020 and soared in 2021, researchers found.

The aggregate total admissions across the sites in January 2018 was 81. That number was 109 in February 2020, before the pandemic started. It jumped to 163 in December 2020 and peaked at 208 in April 2021.

Outpatient visits for the disorders (EDs) also significantly increased after a brief drop when the pandemic started.

Outpatient visits across the sites totaled 195 in January 2018. That number was 254 in February 2020. It increased to 274 in December 2020 and skyrocketed to 425 in March 2021.

“We found marked increases in both inpatient and outpatient volumes of patients with EDs after onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly within the first year,” researchers said. “These increases started to level off, and in some instances decline, in the second year of the pandemic; however, both ED-related inpatient admissions and new ED outpatient assessments remained above prepandemic baselines.”

Other studies have also marked increases in eating disorders during the pandemic, particularly among adolescents and young adults.

Admissions related to disorders among adolescents more than doubled in the first 12 months of the pandemic, researchers with the Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan said in one paper. Another set of U.S. researchers found a doubling of patients with eating disorders during the final nine months of 2020. And researchers in Australia recorded a jump in children with anorexia nervosa, a disorder, requiring admission to a hospital for nutritional treatment compared with the three years immediately before the pandemic.
The new study was performed by researchers in Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, California, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Missouri. It was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers said their findings “indicate that the current health care system for patients with EDs may quickly become overwhelmed by the pandemic-associated increase in volume of patients with EDs,” pointing to struggles to hire enough clinicians with adequate disorder-related training even before the pandemic.

Disorders are important to address in a timely manner, the researchers said. Possible consequences of delayed treatment include patients needing hospital care.

“In the future, increased access to outpatient ED assessments and ED program intakes could be made possible by a larger workforce with ED expertise; this increased access could help avoid medical hospitalizations and potentially shorten hospital stays as well,” the researchers said.

Zachary Stieber
Senior Reporter
Zachary Stieber is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times based in Maryland. He covers U.S. and world news. Contact Zachary at zack.stieber@epochtimes.com
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