People with substance use disorders are far more likely to develop COVID-19 than those in the general population, a new study shows.
Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the study examines EHR data for 73 million patients collected from 360 hospitals and 317,000 providers across the U.S. Of those patients, 7.5 million were diagnosed with a substance use disorder within the last year or prior; 722,370 were diagnosed with a substance use disorder within the last year; and 12,030 were diagnosed with COVID-19.
Researchers found that the likelihood of patients with a recent diagnosis of substance use disorder developing COVID-19 was more than eightfold higher than those who did not have substance use disorders. The odds of those with opioid use disorders developing COVID-19 is tenfold higher than those without.
COVID-19 patients with substance use disorder had significantly worse rates of death and hospitalization than general COVID-19 patients.
In addition, researchers found that among patients with recent diagnosis of substance use disorder, Black patients had significantly higher risk of COVID-19 than white patients.
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