Individual Differences Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Age, Gender, Personality, and Positive Psychology.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Bernabe-Valero G
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8012731 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Little research has focused on whether there are individual differences among children in their sensitivity to sweet taste and, if so, the biological correlates of such differences.Our goal was to understand how variations in children's sucrose detection thresholds relate to their age and gender, taste genotype, body composition, and dietary intake of added sugars.Sucrose detection thresholds in 7- to 14-year-old children were tested individually using a validated, two-alternative, forced-choice, paired-comparison tracking method. Five genetic variants of taste genes were assayed: TAS1R3 and GNAT3 (sweet genes; one variant each) and the bitter receptor gene TAS2R38 (three variants). All children were measured for body weight and height. A subset of these children were measured for the percentage of body fat and waist circumference and provided added sugar intake by 24-hour dietary recall.Sucrose thresholds ranged from 0.23 to 153.8 mM with most of the children completing the threshold task (216/235; 92%). Some children were biologically related (i.e., siblings), and for the genetic analysis, one sibling from each family was studied. Variants in the bitter but not the sweet genes were related to sucrose threshold and sugar intake; children with two bitter-sensitive alleles could detect sucrose at lower concentrations (F(2,165) = 4.55, p = .01; rs1726866) and reported eating more added sugar (% kcal; F(2, 62) = 3.64, p = .03) than did children with less sensitive alleles. Age, gender, and indices of obesity also were related to child-to-child differences in sucrose threshold; girls were more sensitive than boys (t(214) = 2.0, p = .05), older children were more sensitive than younger children (r(214) = -.16, p = .02), and fatter (r(84) = -.22, p = .05) or more centrally obese children (r(84) = -.26, p = .02) were more sensitive relative to others.Inborn differences in bitter sensitivity may affect childhood dietary sugar intake with long-term health consequences. There may be a more complex interplay between the developing bitter and sweet taste systems than previously understood.
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Project description:IntroductionThe ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is having major effects on cancer research, including major reductions in participant accrual to cancer clinical trials. Existing research has indicated that these steep drops in accrual rates to cancer clinical trials may be disproportionately affecting women. We sought to determine if there were gender differences in a dataset collected to examine participants' concerns about taking part in cancer research during the pandemic.MethodsBetween 5-19 June 2020, we distributed a fully anonymized survey via social media. We contacted 85 UK cancer patient organizations/charities and asked them to share our questionnaire on their platforms, of which 26 obliged. Patients aged 18 with a cancer diagnosis were eligible to participate and asked about their clinical and demographic characteristics, concerns about research participation given the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety levels measured using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) scale, amongst other questions. Anxiety levels and concerns about participating were compared between men and women using univariate and multivariate analyses.Results93 individuals, comprising n = 37 women and n = 56 men of various cancer types, provided survey responses. Independent t-tests showed that women reported higher anxiety scores, and concerns about participating in cancer research during COVID-19, than men. Linear regression analyses showed that anxiety scores predicted concerns about research participation in women but not men (pinteraction = 0.002).ConclusionsCancer patients have concerns about participating in research during the COVID-19 pandemic that range from mild to serious. Furthermore, the relationship between general anxiety and concerns about research participation may be both more relevant and more pronounced in women than in men. Future work should examine the reasons why women are less likely to enrol in cancer trials during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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