The impact of COVID-19 on adolescents with eating disorders: a cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a noticeable lack of evidence regarding the impact of COVID-19 and the associated lockdown on young people with eating disorders. The goals of this study were 1) to examine characteristics of adolescents presenting for eating disorder (ED) assessment since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) to compare adolescents presenting for ED assessment since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to those that presented for assessment 1 year previously; 3) to examine implications of the pandemic on the system of care. METHODS: A retrospective chart review was completed on all patients assessed at a pediatric tertiary care ED program during the pandemic between April 1 and October 31, 2020, and on youth assessed during the same time frame 1 year previously. Data including body measurements and results of psychological measures was extracted from patients' charts. Clinician reports were utilized for accounts of ED symptoms. Referrals to our program were also compared for the two time periods. RESULTS: Of the 48 youth assessed between April and October 2020, average age was 14.6 years and average percentage of treatment goal weight was 77.7%. 40% cited the pandemic as a trigger for their ED; of these youth, 78.9% were medically unstable compared to 55.2% of those whose ED was not triggered by the pandemic. When comparing the 2020 cohort to those assessed in 2019, youth who presented for assessment during the pandemic trended towards having lower percentage of goal weights and higher rates of self-reported impairment, and were significantly more likely to be medically unstable (p = 0.005) and to require hospitalization (p = 0.005). Higher rates of inpatient admissions, emergency room consultation requests and outpatient referrals deemed "urgent" were likewise associated with the pandemic period. CONCLUSIONS: During the COVID-19 pandemic, youth assessed for an ED presented with high rates of medical instability and need for hospitalization. Caring for these youth may be more challenging during the pandemic, when access to services may be limited. Further research is required to better understand the impact of the pandemic on the clinical course and outcomes of EDs in adolescents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".