August 22, 2024 – Unvaccinated individuals who grow to be seriously in poor health with COVID-19 could also be at increased risk of developing mental health problems, with certain illnesses becoming more common within the weeks following diagnosis, no matter vaccination status.
Previous research has already linked COVID and an increased risk of mental illness. But a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatryshows that the chance of depression is highest, although almost all the ten or so common mental illnesses were more prone to be diagnosed after a COVID infection, with the best risk observed after hospitalization and in unvaccinated people.
For people hospitalized for COVID, the chance of post-hospital depression was as much as 16 times higher than the chance before or without COVID.
For the studyResearchers checked out health data from greater than 18 million adults registered with primary care clinics in England and analyzed data from three groups:
- Unvaccinated people within the early days of the pandemic when vaccines weren't yet available (January 2020 to June 2021)
- Unvaccinated people throughout the Delta variant era when vaccines were widely available (June to December 2021)
- Vaccinated people throughout the Delta variant era when vaccines were widely available (June to December 2021)
The researchers found that within the early days of the pandemic, before vaccines were available, all people diagnosed with COVID had a better risk of mental illness, much like risk rates amongst unvaccinated people later within the pandemic, when vaccines were available became.
“These results suggest that vaccination can mitigate the negative mental health effects of COVID-19,” the authors write.
The conditions they searched for included depression, generalized anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, addiction, self-harm, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and suicide. The risk for many of those was higher in the primary 4 weeks after a COVID diagnosis.
People who were vaccinated against COVID had a lower risk of developing these mental illnesses, although they were often still at higher risk after a COVID diagnosis. People hospitalized for COVID were most in danger. The increased risk for unvaccinated people lasted as much as a 12 months in the event that they had a severe case of COVID.
Researchers identified plenty of limitations to their study, including that unvaccinated people can have been less prone to seek medical care or get tested for COVID, which could mean some effects were underestimated within the study results. Another limitation was that the study relied on data from health records, which regularly contain incomplete details about mental illness.
Additionally, people within the study with documented COVID diagnoses, particularly severe ones requiring hospitalization, were more prone to have documented mental illness “due to greater contact with health care services,” the authors wrote. “However, given the continued increase in the incidence of mental illness after COVID-19 with hospitalizations and the disparities between mental illnesses, it is unlikely that this can fully explain the adverse effects,” they said.
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