Editor's Note This study led by researchers at Rutgers University finds that Black and White women in their mid 20s who reported frequent binge drinking during the pandemic were more likely to become infected with COVID-19. The researchers examined seven subgroups of 938 young Black and White women ranging from…
Editor's Note This study led by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, finds a 23.5% decrease in substance use disorder treatment admissions across the US during COVID-19. In 2020, the number of substance use disorders admissions decreased from 65.9 to 50.4 per 10,000. The decrease was larger for men (87.5…
Editor's Note In this study from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, researchers identify distinct demographic subpopulations with diverging drinking trajectories during the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 8,130 US adults were surveyed biweekly from March 2020 to January 2021 on their past-week alcohol…
Editor's Note Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, inflation, money issues, and the war in Ukraine have pushed US stress to alarming levels, according to the American Psychological Association (APA). APA partnered with the The Harris Poll to conduct a survey between February 7 and 14, 2022, and again…
Editor's Note This study from the University of California, Los Angeles, finds that Blacks had the largest percentage increase in overdose mortality rates in 2020, overtaking the rates among Whites for the first time since 1999. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for…
Editor's Note This study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System finds that those who have had COVID-19 were 60% more likely to experience mental health problems for up to a year. The analysis involved 153,848 patients who survived the…
Editor's Note The Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), on February 16, awarded New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a 3-year, $2.1 million grant to develop a new training initiative to help healthcare workers (HCWs) deal with the mental health…
Editor's Note In this study from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, researchers find a roughly tenfold increase in opioid deaths in adults 55 years and older, driven primarily by overdoses in Black men. Analyzing data on 79,893 individuals aged 55 years and older who died from opioid overdose…
The Joint Commission on June 18 issued prepublication standards for its New and Revised Workplace Violence Prevention Requirements, which will apply to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals starting January 1, 2022. Revisions range from some wording changes in existing requirements to the addition of new Elements of Performance (EP) within certain…
Editor's Note New provisional data released July 14 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that more than 93,331 people died from drug overdoes in the US last year. The nearly 30% rise from 2019 was mostly triggered by COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, treatment inaccessibility, and proliferation of…