COVID-19 patients at higher risk of mental health disorders: study

by Monique Beals - 02/17/22 10:15 AM ET

A new study published on Wednesday showed that people who have recovered from COVID-19 are significantly more likely to develop mental health disorders regardless of the severity of their COVID-19 case.

The study, which was published in the BMJ medical journal, looked at millions of health records and found that COVID-19 patients were at increased risk for concerns like anxiety, depression, substance abuse and cognitive impairment.

Specifically, the study showed that people who had COVID-19 were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression and 35 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety. They were also 38 percent more likely to have stress and adjustment disorders and 41 percent more likely to have sleeping disorders.

Researchers targeted nearly 154,000 people in the Department of Veterans Affairs who got COVID-19 between March 2020 and January 2021 and followed them for a year. That group was compared to a group of 5 million people who did not contract COVID-19 but lived under the same pandemic conditions including lockdowns, closures, financial concerns and general loneliness.

“We knew that mental health of the U.S. population in general was affected by the pandemic, but we didn’t know what happened to people specifically with COVID-19, and did they really have it worse?” Ziyad Al-Aly said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Al-Aly, who led the study, is the VA St. Louis Health Care System’s chief of research and development and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University. He noted that his study was the most comprehensive of its kind thus far.

“Nothing like this has been published so far,” he said.

Tags COVID-19 Mental health