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Study: COVID-19 Significantly Raises Risk of Mental Health Problems
Miscellaneous / / February 22, 2022
Depression or an anxiety disorder may develop within a year of the infection.
American scientists from Washington University in St. Louis heldRisks of mental health outcomes in people with covid-19: cohort study / BMJ large-scale study of the consequences of COVID-19. They analyzed medical records collected by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
Information about 150 thousand patients who recovered from COVID-19 from March 2020 to January 2021 were compared with two control groups of 5 million people each. One of them included people who did not become infected with COVID-19 in the same time period, and the other included patients whose condition was described a year and a half before the start of the pandemic.
Scientists say: COVID-19 likely led to 14.8 million new cases of mental disorders worldwide. Within a year after recovery, more than 18% of patients who recovered from coronavirus encountered them. In the control groups, the frequency of such cases was one and a half times less.
The disease increased the risk of developing depression by 40%, anxiety by 35%, sleep disorders by 41%, and substance use disorders by 34%. In addition, patients who recovered from coronavirus were 55% more likely to be prescribed antidepressants within a year after infection.
In addition, after COVID-19, people were 80% more likely to experience neurocognitive problems, ranging from severe fatigue, confusion and brain fog to progression to dementia. The more severe the infection, the higher the likelihood of subsequent mental health problems, but in mild and asymptomatic cases, such conditions also occurred.
The lead author of the study emphasized:
Although we have all suffered during the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 feel much worse mentally. We must acknowledge this reality and address these conditions now before they develop into a much larger mental health crisis.
Ziyad Al Ali
MD, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, USA
Al-Ali and his colleagues intend to find out why COVID-19 leads to psychological problems. On the one hand, they can be caused by physiological mechanisms: disruption of cellular regulation and signaling in neurons. On the other hand, for low-income people with unstable jobs, the risk of contracting an infection is higher - and at the same time they have a stronger predisposition to mental illness. Therefore, scientists need more data for a full-fledged objective analysis.
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Ksenia Shestakova
For 10 years in IT, I tried a lot: I worked as a system administrator and tester, I wrote in a dozen different languages programming, led the computer department of the editorial office of a printed newspaper and led news feeds high-tech portals. I can patch KDE2 for FreeBSD - and tell you in detail about all the nuances of this process. I dream about homemade R2-D2 and space flight.
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