Inpatient Psychiatric Burden in Adolescents With Atopic Dermatitis

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is associated with an elevated risk of mood and anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and suicidal ideation, though there remains a lack of data assessing the impact of atopic dermatitis on hospitalization for psychiatric illness among adolescents. We reviewed the 2022 Kids' Inpatient Database for adolescent patients with AD and sought to assess the primary outcome of whether their reason for hospital admission was psychiatric in nature, encompassing suicidal ideation, mood, psychotic, substance use, neurodevelopmental, trauma, personality, obsessive-compulsive, or eating disorders. A total of 1520 patients with AD were identified in this study, propensity-matched with 7634 controls, with psychiatric reasons accounting for 367 admissions (24.1%) in the AD cohort compared with 2034 (26.6%) in the control group (p = 0.2). On multivariate analysis, patients with atopic dermatitis did not have significantly different odds of experiencing hospital admission for psychiatric reasons relative to controls (aOR: 0.87; 95% CI: 0.72-1.05), suggesting that any added psychiatric burden from AD may not necessarily lead to severe disease progression requiring hospitalization.