The global prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress, and, insomnia and its changes among health professionals during COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid systematic review and meta-analysis
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused unprecedented risks to mental health among health workers globally.
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The prevalence of mental health disorder namely depression, anxiety, stress, and insomnia were significantly increased over the time from January 2020 to September 2020 among the teams working closer to infected patients.
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Comparatively higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress, and insomnia were observed from previous studies on medical health professionals during COVID-19 pandemic.
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It is an emergency to develop psychological interventions that can protect the mental health of vulnerable groups like health professionals.
Abstract
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the health professionals who are at the frontline of this crisis have been facing extreme psychological disorders. This research aims to provide an overall scenario of the prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress, as well as insomnia and to inspect the changes in these prevalence over time by analyzing the existing evidence during this COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
A systematic search was performed on March 30, 2021, in PubMed, MEDLINE, Google Scholar databases, and Web of Science. To assess the heterogeneity, Q-test, statistics, and Meta regression and to search for the publication bias, Eggers's test and funnel plot were used. The random-effect model and subgroup analysis were performed due to the significant heterogeneity.
Results
Among eighty-three eligible studies in the final synthesis, 69 studies (n = 144649) assessed the depression prevalence of 37.12% (95% CI: 31.80–42.43), 75 studies (n = 147435) reported the anxiety prevalence of 41.42% (95% CI: 36.17–46.54), 41 studies (n = 82783) assessed the stress prevalence of 44.86% (95% CI: 36.98–52.74), 21 studies (n = 33370) enunciated the insomnia prevalence of 43.76% (95% CI: 35.83–51.68). The severity of the mental health problems among health professionals increased over the time during January 2020 to September 2020.
Limitations
A significant level of heterogeneity was found among psychological measurement tools and across studies.
Conclusions
Therefore, it is an emergency to develop psychological interventions that can protect the mental health of vulnerable groups like health professionals.
