Trends in Pediatric Emergency and Inpatient Healthcare Use for Mental and Behavioral Health Among North Carolinians During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society December 2023

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Sielaty R, Boutzoukas AE, Zimmerman KO, Caison B, Charles CO, CoyneSmith T, Darden T, Overman RA, Benjamin, Jr DK, Brookhart MA

Widespread school closures and health care avoidance during the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruptions in access to pediatric mental health care. This study conducted a retrospective analysis of emergency and inpatient administrative claims from privately insured children aged 6-20 years in North Carolina between January 2019 and December 2020.

External Evaluation of Risperidone Population Pharmacokinetic Models Using Opportunistic Pediatric Data

Frontiers in Pharmacology March 2022

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Karatza E, Ganguly S, Hornik CD, Muller MJ, Al-Uzri A, James L, Balevic SJ, Gonzalez D; on behalf of the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act – Pediatric Trials Network Steering Committee
Risperidone is approved to treat schizophrenia in adolescents and autistic disorder and bipolar mania in children and adolescents. It is also used off-label in younger children for various psychiatric disorders. The objectives of this study were to assess whether opportunistically collected pediatric data can be used to evaluate risperidone population pharmacokinetic models externally and to identify a robust model for precision dosing in children. All the models had a modest predictive performance, potentially suggesting that sources of inter-individual variability were not entirely captured and that opportunistic data from a highly heterogeneous population are likely not the most appropriate data to evaluate risperidone models externally.

Impact of COVID-19-related School Closures on the Drivers of Child Health

North Carolina Medical Journal February 2021

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Boutzoukas AE, Akinboyo IC, Wong CA, Benjamin DK, Zimmerman KO

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in large-scale school closures in an effort to reduce the spread of disease. This article reviews the potential impact of COVID-19-related school closures on the health of children in North Carolina, with particular attention to the impact of school closures on drivers of child health.