Objective
COVID‐19 pandemic has been a stressful condition. We explored life changes and health‐related consequences of COVID‐19 outbreak in Italian healthcare workers in comparison to the general population.
Methods
A total of 593 subjects participated to the online CoRonavIruS Health Impact Survey. Life events and changes, physical health and worries were evaluated referring to 2 weeks prior to the survey. Mood states and daily behaviour were retrospectively evaluated referring to 3 months before COVID‐19 (T1) and 2 weeks prior to the survey (T2). Student
t
test, Mann–Whitney test and multivariate logistic regression analyses were run.
Results
Five hundred and twenty‐one subjects were analysed (healthcare workers:
n
= 163, 31.84%; general population:
n
= 349, 68.16%). Healthcare workers were more likely to report fatigue and have spent more time outside home during the 2 weeks prior to the survey than the general population (
χ
2
(
df
)
= 266.0
3(17)
,
p
< 0.001,
R
2
= 0.57). From T1 to T2, healthcare workers had a significant increase in negative mood, worry, restlessness, loneliness and a decrease in happiness, while subjects from the general population had a statistically significant increase in negative mood, worry, attention, concentration difficulties and a decrease in happiness, pleasure related to daily activities, time spent outdoors and alcohol use.
Conclusion
In the framework of a growing literature on healthcare workers' status during the COVID‐19 pandemic, the present study allowed to identify fatigue and loneliness as psychosomatic modifiable variables in need of being monitored and, possibly managed, to ameliorate the health status of healthcare workers.
Our data shows that PD patients experiencing anticipatory anxiety may present with lower mobility, consistent with the freezing behavior of the defense cascade. The data also shows that PD patients do not have a postural instability when confronted with specific anxiogenic context. The importance of this study is that it objectively demonstrates freezing-like behavior in PD patients.
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