Hospital admission for children with eating disorders approximately tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on data from 85 patients.
Eating disorders are common among adolescents and often require hospital admission for nutritional restoration, according to May Shum of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., and colleagues.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of hospital admissions for adolescents with eating disorders has increased, the researchers wrote in a poster presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies. This increase may be driven both by interruptions in medical care and increased psychological distress, but data on changes in patient characteristics and hospitalization course are lacking, they said.
The researchers reviewed charts from patients with eating disorders admitted to a single center between Jan. 1, 2017, and June 30, 2021. The majority of the patients were female (90.6%), and White (78.8%), had restrictive eating behaviors (97.2%), and had private insurance (80.0%).
Overall, the number of monthly admissions increased from 1.4 before the onset of the pandemic to 3.6 during the pandemic (P < .001).
Length of stay increased significantly from before to during pandemic cases (12.8 days vs. 17.3 days, P= .04) and age younger than 13 years was significantly associated with a longer length of stay (
