The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on mental health care use among Norwegian students in higher education: a nation-wide register-based pre-post cohort study

Table 1 Descriptive statistics on group characteristics for pre-pandemic and pandemic students

	Pandemic cohort		Pre-pandemic cohort
Sample characteristics
Persons, N	12 501		25 990
Age, mean (SD)	19 (0)		19 (0)
Sex, N (%)
Females	7 878 (63.0)		16 241 (62.5)
Males	4 623 (37.0)		9 749 (37.5)
Birth country, N (%)
Norway	11 192 (89.5)		23 587 (90.8)
Abroad	1 309 (10.5)		2 403 (9.2)
Mental health outcomes, monthly %	Jan 2019-Feb 2020	Mar 2020-Feb 2022	Jan 2019-Feb 2020^a	Mar 2020-Feb 2022^b
Primary care consultations					ICPC-2 codes
Any mental symptom or disorder	1.15	1.25	1.17	1.38	All chapter P codes
Anxiety, depression	0.64	0.72	0.66	0.86	P01, P02, P03, P74, P76, P79, P82
Sleep disturbance	0.17	0.13	0.17	0.14	P06

Mental health outcomes show the monthly percentage of pandemic and pre-pandemic students with a mental health consultation. See table A1 for the corresponding table for dispensed prescription drug (anxiolytic, antidepressant, or sedative). In primary care reimbursement codes 2ad, 2ak, 2ae is used to identify consultations at general practitioner or emergency ward
^a,bJanuary 2019-February 2022 refers to the measurement time (calendar month) for the pandemic students, i.e., measurements for the pre-pandemic students were made 12 and 24 months earlier. ^aJanuary 2019-February 2020 corresponds to relative months -14 to -1 (pre-treatment period). ^bMarch 2020-February 2022 corresponds to relative months 1 to 23 (post-treatment period)

ISSN: 1472-6963