Among young people, demand for both inpatient and outpatient care for eating disorders grew in the first year of the pandemic, according to a case series study published Nov. 7 in JAMA Pediatrics.
Researchers looked at volume changes in inpatient and outpatient eating disorder-related care across 14 "geographically diverse hospital-based adolescent medicine programs," and one non-hospital treatment program, from January 2018 to December 2021.
Inpatient admissions for eating disorders increased significantly in the first year of the pandemic, the findings showed. In the two years before the pandemic, inpatient admissions among teens and young adults increased by a mean of 0.7 percent per month. That figure rose to 7.2 percent during the first year of the pandemic.
"We were able to show that at multiple sites throughout the country, there were significant increases in patients with eating disorders after the start of the pandemic — that this wasn't just a phenomenon in one place," Sydney Hartman-Munick, MD, study author and assistant professor of pediatrics at the UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Mass., told CNN. "The results are in line with what we are all feeling working day to day in our clinics and in the hospital."
For outpatient eating disorder care, researchers found volumes declined immediately after the pandemic's onset, and then significantly increased over time by a mean of 8.1 percent per month through April 2021.
The rise in admissions and outpatient visits leveled off in 2021, though stayed above pre-pandemic levels through the end of the study period, "so we are likely to feel the impact of this increase in volume for quite some time," Dr. Hartman-Munick said.