Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-14-2020
Abstract
The global pandemic of COVID-19 is colliding with the epidemic of opioid use disorders (OUD) and other substance use disorders (SUD) in the United States (US). Currently, there is limited data on risks, disparity, and outcomes for COVID-19 in individuals suffering from SUD. This is a retrospective case-control study of electronic health records (EHRs) data of 73,099,850 unique patients, of whom 12,030 had a diagnosis of COVID-19. Patients with a recent diagnosis of SUD (within past year) were at significantly increased risk for COVID-19 (adjusted odds ratio or AOR=8.699 [8.411–8.997], P<10−30), an effect that was strongest for individuals with OUD (AOR=10.244 [9.107–11.524], P<10−30), followed by individuals with tobacco use disorder (TUD) (AOR=8.222 ([7.925–8.530], P<10−30). Compared to patients without SUD, patients with SUD had significantly higher prevalence of chronic kidney, liver, lung diseases, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer. Among patients with recent diagnosis of SUD, African Americans had significantly higher risk of COVID-19 than Caucasians (AOR=2.173 [2.01–2.349], P<10−30), with strongest effect for OUD (AOR=4.162 [3.13–5.533], P<10−25). COVID-19 patients with SUD had significantly worse outcomes (death: 9.6%, hospitalization: 41.0%) than general COVID-19 patients (death: 6.6%, hospitalization: 30.1%) and African Americans with COVID-19 and SUD had worse outcomes (death: 13.0%, hospitalization: 50.7%) than Caucasians (death: 8.6%, hospitalization: 35.2%). These findings identify individuals with SUD, especially individuals with OUD and African Americans, as having increased risk for COVID-19 and its adverse outcomes, highlighting the need to screen and treat individuals with SUD as part of the strategy to control the pandemic while ensuring no disparities in access to healthcare support.
Keywords
COVID-19 (disease), communicable diseases, coronavirus infections
Publication Title
Molecular Psychiatry
Rights
© Springer Nature Limited 2020. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Q.Q., Kaelber, D.C., Xu, R. et al. COVID-19 risk and outcomes in patients with substance use disorders: analyses from electronic health records in the United States. Mol Psychiatry 26, 30–39 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-020-00880-7