Importance: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected youth mental health. Increases in site-specific eating disorder (ED) care have been documented; however, multisite studies demonstrating national trends are lacking.
Objective: To compare the number of adolescent/young adult patients seeking inpatient and outpatient ED care before and after onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Background And Objectives: Emerging data suggest the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been associated with worsening symptoms of eating disorders (EDs) among both adults and adolescents. With this study, we sought to determine if medical admission patterns among adolescents admitted to our institution for restrictive EDs changed during the pandemic, relative to prepandemic counts of admissions per month.
Methods: We performed a chart review of patients aged 10 to 23 years admitted to our children's hospital for restrictive EDs from March 2017 through March 2021 and completed an interrupted time series analysis of admission counts per month.