A recent report has found that eating disorder-related health visits have more than doubled among people under the age of 17 in the past half-decade after seeing a spike in hospitalizations during the pandemic.
The data comes from Trilliant Health, which shared that from 2018 to 2022, the number of visits among adolescents under 17 jumped by 107.4% across all eating disorders. The number of reported hospital visits jumped from 50,000 in 2018 to 100,000 in 2022.
The data reported in Trilliant Health’s report classified health visits as hospital stays, pediatrician visits, telehealth talk therapy, and more.
Eating disorders have long been an issue in children but has skyrocketed in recent years, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that the number of hospitalizations doubled among adolescent girls throughout the pandemic.
The report highlighted that the disorder which saw the biggest increase in health visits was anorexia nervosa, with a jump of 129.26%.
Data shows that the pandemic was a primary cause of the recent increase in eating disorders, as the incidences of anxiety and depression increased while the world shut down.
Now, experts like Melissa Freizinger, the associate director of the eating disorder program at Boston Children’s Hospital, are seeing the results of the world reopened, and she warns they aren’t making a turnaround.
“The kids are not OK,” Freizinger told NBC News. “As the pandemic started and then progressed, we kept thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to get better in 2022. Oh, it’s going to get better in 2023. But it hasn’t.”
The data in the report shows a slight dip in eating disorder-related visits after it peaked in 2021, but the numbers have not gotten anywhere near where they were before the pandemic.
Part of the issue that experts are now seeing in eating disorder cases is that they are becoming more complex and complicated.
“They’re sicker than before, and they’re more complicated than they were before,” Freizinger said, highlighting that patients they see coming in now with eating disorders are in more serious condition, having both mental and physical symptoms that appear more urgent.
Experts say that patients now are needing to be medically stabilized for malnourishment more and are suffering from more severe psychiatric symptoms.
“We all have collective trauma from the pandemic, but many of these kids have PTSD,” Freizinger said. “They’re also younger.”
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