Emphasize to Prioritize Covid-19 Vaccination and Optimize Healthcare for Mentally Ill

The threshold of death rate amongst those with mental complications in such a short period of COVID-19 pandemic time is a historic international tragedy. Statistical study based on more than 160,000 patients finds that the death rate amongst those with mental complications and intellectual disabilities has dramatically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, the death toll in these patients was comparatively higher than the normal populace. However, it is further intensified, as we find from the study, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe that between March and June 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, the death toll in mentally ill surged to the peak.

Deaths from COVID-19 among those with learning disabilities were nine times higher than the general population during the first lockdown period, according to the study, and for those with eating disorders almost five times higher.

For those with personality disorders and those with dementia, deaths from COVID-19 were about four times higher than the general population and more than three times higher in people with schizophrenia.

The research was part-funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and used the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system to analyze anonymized data from clinical e-records of patients from South London.

Senior author Rob Stewart, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology & Clinical Informatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, said: “These findings and their implications illustrate the importance of being able to learn from the information contained in health records. We have worked with Maudsley’s CRIS platform for nearly 15 years now and a key focus has been to highlight inequalities in mortality and general health. Because CRIS information is updated every week, this has allowed us to track the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on mental health services.”

“People living with severe mental health conditions and intellectual disabilities should be considered a vulnerable group at risk of COVID-19 mortality, as well as deaths from other causes, throughout the pandemic. We suggest a need to prioritize vaccination and optimize physical health care and suicide risk reduction, before, during, and after peaks of COVID-19 infection in people living with mental health conditions.”

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Deaths among people with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities decreased from July to September 2020 as COVID-19 instances decreased and lockdowns were lifted, but they remained twice as high as the general population, which was close to the numbers before the pandemic.

Within the sample, similar death trends were identified across minority ethnic groups, with South Asian and Black Caribbean adults with severe mental health disorders and intellectual disabilities 2.5 times more likely to die during the pandemic than in the year preceding the pandemic.

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Source-Medindia