The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Antidepressant Prescribing with a focus on people with learning disability and autism: An interrupted time-series analysis in England using OpenSAFELY-TPP
medRxiv
2024
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Article Description
Background COVID-19 lockdowns led to increased reports of depressive symptoms in the general population and impacted the health and social care services of people with learning disability and autism. We explored whether the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on antidepressant prescribing trends within these and the general population. Methods With the approval of NHS England, we used >24 million patients’ primary care data from the OpenSAFELY-TPP platform. We identified patients with learning disability or autism and used an interrupted time series analysis to quantify trends in those prescribed and newly prescribed an antidepressant across key demographic and clinical subgroups, comparing pre-COVID-19 (January 2018-February 2020), COVID-19 lockdown (March 2020-February 2021) and the recovery period (March 2021-December 2022). Results Prior to COVID-19 lockdown, antidepressant prescribing was increasing at 0.3% (95% CI 0.2% to 0.3%) patients per month, in the general population and in those with learning disability, and 0.3% (95% CI 0.2% to 0.4%) in those with autism. We did not find evidence that the pandemic was associated with a change in trend of antidepressant prescribing in the general population (RR 1.00 (95% CI 0.97 to 1.02)), in those with autism (RR 0.99 (95% CI 0.97 to 1.01)), or in those with learning disability (RR 0.98 (95% CI 0.96 to 1.00)). New prescribing post lockdown was 13% and 12% below expected if COVID-19 had not happened in both the general population and those with autism (RR 0.87 (95% CI 0.83 to 0.93), RR 0.88 (95% CI 0.83 to 0.92))), but not learning disability (RR 0.96 (95% CI 0.87 to 1.05)). Conclusions and Implications Pre-COVID-19, antidepressant prescribing was increasing at 0.3% per month. While we did not see an impact of COVID-19 on overall prescribing in the general population, prescriptions to those aged 0-19, 20-29, and new prescriptions were lower than pre-COVID-19 trends would have predicted, but tricyclics and new prescriptions in care homes were higher than expected.
Bibliographic Details
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
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