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%).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1180407
Entities
People
- Bryn Austin
- Mihail Samnaliev
Organizations
- Boston VA Research Institute
- Western Institute For Biomedical Research