Trends in the incidence of asthma, atopic dermatitis, and multiple sclerosis before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic in a US claims database
Kexin Zhu, Julie Barberio, Nicole Tsao, Anil Mor, Venkatesh Harikrishnan, Xinyu Li, Sarah-Jo Sinnott · 2026
Read Trends in the incidence of asthma, atopic dermatitis, and multiple sclerosis before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic in a US claims database by Kexin Zhu, Julie Barberio, Nicole Tsao, Anil Mor, Venkatesh Harikrishnan, Xinyu Li, Sarah-Jo Sinnott (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13422859.txt.
Description
Zhu and co-authors track diagnostic shadows of the pandemic in a large United States insurance claims database, in this 2026 study. They ask what happened to new diagnoses of asthma, eczema, and multiple sclerosis when healthcare use collapsed in 2020. They built twenty seasonal cohorts from 2018 through 2022 and standardized incidence by age and sex.
Against spring 2018, spring 2020 incidence fell 14 percent for asthma, 28 percent for atopic dermatitis, and 23 percent for multiple sclerosis by the reported rate ratios. The deepest drops were in children, adolescents, and seniors. Rates rebounded to or above baseline by summer 2020 for eczema and multiple sclerosis and by spring 2021 for asthma. The authors interpret the dip as delayed care rather than true disease decline, a caution for anyone using pandemic-era data to study disease trends.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kexin Zhu, Julie Barberio, Nicole Tsao, Anil Mor, Venkatesh Harikrishnan, Xinyu Li, Sarah-Jo Sinnott |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 21 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |