Data from the 2019 National Health Interview Survey was used for the analysis. The survey polled around 32,000 adults. It is conducted throughout the year by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Overall, 9.5 percent of adults had mild anxiety symptoms, while 3.4 percent had moderate symptoms, and 2.7 percent had severe symptoms. Slightly more than 84 percent of adults had minimal or no symptoms.
Women were more likely than men to have experienced anxiety symptoms that were:
● Mild: 11.3 percent of women versus 7.6 percent of men
● Moderate: 4.3 percent of women versus 2.4 percent of men
● Severe: 3.5 percent of women versus 1.9 percent of men
Women were also more likely to receive counseling, therapy or take prescription medication to improve their mental health, ABC News reports.
“These are good pre-COVID benchmarks, and we want to look now and see, do they change in 2020?” Emily Terlizzi, study co-author and health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics, told ABC News.
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