Eating disorder rates jumped ‘significantly’ among adolescents amid COVID: study

globalnews.ca:

Eating disorders requiring hospital care increased “significantly” among children and teenagers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research.

A study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) on Tuesday revealed that emergency department visits and hospitalizations for eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa were higher than expected among adolescents aged 10 to 17 years.

Researchers in Ontario looked at province-wide data from March 2020 to August 2022 and compared it with pre-pandemic numbers from January 2017 to February 2020.

Since the pandemic started, they found that the overall rate of ER visits among adolescents jumped by 121 per cent above expected levels, whereas the rate of hospital admissions was up 54 per cent above what was expected in that age bracket.

“The pandemic shed light on eating disorders, and it served as a catalyst to bring these issues forward,” said Dr. Alene Toulany, an adolescent medicine specialist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and one of the study co-authors.

“What we found was … there was a persistent surge in emergency department visits and hospitalizations for young people, especially,” she told Global News in an interview.

Emergency visits among young adults aged 18 to 26 years and older Canadians aged 41 years and above also went up during the pandemic period, but relatively smaller increases were observed, the study said.

Meanwhile, hospital admissions related to eating disorders for all Canadians aged 18 and older decreased below the expected rate.

In all age groups, women required higher rates of hospital care for eating disorders than was expected, according to the CMAJ study.

“A combination of risk