27 Racial-Ethnic Differences in Antipsychotic Initiation Among Youth with Diagnosed ADHD, Depression, or Conduct Disorder

Abstract

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: This study examined racial-ethnic differences in antipsychotic initiation within psychiatric diagnostic groups. This is a follow-up to our prior work, which reported that, overall, youth from minority backgrounds had 30-65% lower odds of initiating antipsychotics compared to White youth. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: This study used 2009-2021 data from Optum’s® Clinformatics® Data Mart, a database containing longitudinal patient information from nationwide commercial insurance claims. We created three separate samples of antipsychotic users and matched non-user controls between the ages of 6-17 years old. These groups contained individuals with clinically diagnosed ADHD, conduct disorder, and depressive disorder, respectively. We used conditional logistic regression to estimate the odds of antipsychotic initiation based on race-ethnicity within each diagnostic group. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: There were no racial-ethnic differences in the odds of antipsychotic initiation among youth diagnosed with ADHD. Among youth with depression diagnoses, Asian youth had 19% lower odds of initiating antipsychotics and Hispanic youth had 11% lower odds compared with White youth. Similar results were observed for conduct disorders, with Asian and Black youth having approximately 10% lower odds of initiating antipsychotic treatment and Hispanic youth having 18% lower odds relative to White youth. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Previously observed lower rates of antipsychotic initiation among racial-ethnic minority groups may be at least partially due to factors leading to disparities in diagnosis. Further research is needed to evaluate factors that may lead to differential antipsychotic use, as the disparities may occur upstream of receiving clinical diagnoses.