Military Veterans with Eating Disorders: Prevalence, Incidence, Patterns of Comorbidity and Cost of Care

Abstract

Scope: Eating disorders (ED), including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder, are serious illnesses that lead to disturbance in ones eating behaviors and can result in poorer health, lower quality of life, and long-term expensive treatment. Very little is known about the prevalence of ED and the patterns of cooccurring mental health and substance use problems among military Veterans. Our study is designed to estimate the prevalence, patterns of co-occurring illness, and costs of ED among Veterans so that we can evaluate the overall burden of disease to inform future design of effective ED screening and treatment programs for military Veterans. Purpose: The purpose of our research activities is to use the largest and most comprehensive database of US military Veterans to: generate precise estimates of ED prevalence (% of Veterans with ED within a year) and incidence (new cases by year) among Veterans in the aggregate; estimate ED prevalence/incidence by sociodemographic groups, including by age, gender, race/ethnicity, obesity status, and age cohort; evaluate whether such co-occurring problems precede (and may lead to) ED or if they develop subsequently to an ED episode (and may be caused in part by ED); document the added utilization and cost of care to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) associated with ED. Major Findings: For Aim 1, we have developed an EHR-based algorithm to identify ED on the aggregate and for ED subtypes among military Veterans and evaluated its performance relative to chart review diagnosis gold standard. An initial evaluation of the performance characteristics for identifying lifetime ED diagnosis using a Lasso algorithm demonstrated its high accuracy (>95%), sensitivity (>95%), specificity (>90%), positive predictive value (>95%), and negative predictive value (>95%).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2022
Accession Number
AD1180332

Entities

People

  • Mihail Samnaliev
  • S. B. Austin

Organizations

  • Boston VA Research Institute
  • Western Institute For Biomedical Research

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Biomedical Research
  • Bulimia Nervosa
  • Comorbidity
  • Department Of Defense
  • Diseases And Disorders
  • Eating Disorders
  • Health
  • Health Care
  • Health Services
  • Hospitals
  • Medical Personnel
  • Mental Health
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Quality Of Life
  • Standards
  • Veterans Health

Fields of Study

  • Medicine

Readers

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