The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everybody’s mental health. An increase in mental health symptoms has been observed in several countries, especially during the first pandemic months. So far, most of the studies have used surveys to quantify changes in mental health symptoms, and focused on the short-term effects of the pandemic.
Real-world data such as health records, with large and representative samples with much longer follow up times, can give us further insights into the effects of the pandemic on people’s mental health. This study will describe patterns of mental health diagnoses and prescriptions before and after the pandemic using data from electronic health records, and we will compare the observed rates to previous trends based on pre-pandemic data.
We will carry out the analysis for several mental health diagnoses and prescriptions of related medications, and will split the analysis by sex and age groups to identify subgroups that might have been affected disproportionately by the pandemic. This work will provide important insights into the long-term effects of the pandemic on population mental health in the UK, and will inform public health policies to mitigate these effects.
The aim of this project is to examine the changes in incidence of mental health diagnoses (depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and adjustment disorders) and psychotropic medication prescribing (antidepressants, anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, and antipsychotics) throughout the pandemic. To date, most of the studies were focused on the acute and short-term effects of the pandemic, and were based on survey-based research, with conclusions from many papers limited due to small sample sizes, unclear generalizability implications and lack pre-COVID-19 comparison. Using a retrospective cohort design, we will calculate incidence and prevalence rates of the studied outcomes, overall and by sex and age groups in a large longitudinal primary care database broadly representative of the UK population. In addition, we will explore different modelling approaches to quantify changes in conditions and prescriptions after the introduction of population-wide restrictions compared with the ten years before their introduction. We will also forecast rates of mental health conditions and psychotropic medications that would have been expected to have been seen without the pandemic, and we will compare observed rates to those expected. From this study, we will be able to quantify changes in mental health conditions and prescriptions during the pandemic, and to identify population subgroups that might have been affected disproportionately. This work will provide important insights on the long-term effects of the pandemic on population mental health in the UK, and will inform public health policies to mitigate these effects
Depressive disorders; anxiety disorders; adjustment disorders; antidepressants; anxiolytics; hypnotics and sedatives; antipsychotics
Edward Burn - Chief Investigator - University of Oxford
Danielle Newby - Corresponding Applicant - University of Oxford
Antonella Delmestri - Collaborator - University of Oxford
Berta Raventós - Collaborator - University of Oxford
Daniel Prieto-Alhambra - Collaborator - University of Oxford
Wai Yi Man - Collaborator - University of Oxford