In a large US study that tracked people for as long as a year, COVID-19 patients had a 60% higher risk of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, or substance abuse compared with those who weren't sickened by the virus.Given the large number of people infected with COVID-19, the findings suggest that nations should take more steps to tackle the growing challenge of managing mental health conditions in survivors.
Researchers based at the Veterans Administration (VA) and Washington University in St. Louis published their findings yesterday in The BMJ.Senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St.
Louis, said in a news release from the school, "But while we've all suffered during the pandemic, people who have had COVID-19 fare far worse mentally.
We need to acknowledge this reality and address these conditions now before they balloon into a much larger mental health crisis."Probing a range of mental health impactsEarlier studies have drawn links between COVID-19 illness and mental health conditions, but the new study is the largest known to date, harnessing information from 153,848 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 from Mar 1, 2020, to Jan 15, 2021, in a database from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is the nation's largest integrated health delivery system.For comparison, the researchers assessed mental health conditions in two control groups: 5.6 million who weren't sick with COVID-19 during the same period, and more than 5.6 million patients who were in the VA system before the pandemic began.The authors emphasized that the study period they focused on came before vaccines were widely available and before the Delta and Omicron variant waves took place.