Demographic information:
The questionnaire consisted of three sections; the first one included
the general demographic information which were age, sex, academic year
(preparatory, preclinical, clinical and internship year), occupation if
had one, regular smoking (yes or no question) and habits such as the
frequency of drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol. The second one included
Zung self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) (9), while the third section
included Yale-Brown OCD Scale (YBCOS) questions (10).
An Arabic version of SAS was used in this study which is a screening
tool for anxiety (11). We also added a choice for each question that
allowed the participant to declare whether they had these symptoms
before COVID-19 as well. Each question had a score from 1 to 4 depending
on the answer. A score of 36 or higher indicated the need for a medical
assessment for GAD and the total score was 80 (9).
An Arabic version produced by native Arabic speakers of the
Obsessive-Compulsive Test YBOCS was used to assess obsessive-compulsive
disorder (12). YBOCS rates the severity and type of symptoms in patients
with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Each option of each question
of this scale was recoded into numbers from 0 to 4. The total score
determines whether the participant had no OCD, mild, moderate, severe,
or extreme OCD and the total score was 40 (9).
Data analysis:
We used IBM SPSS software, version 26 for Windows (IBM Corp.: Armonk,
New York) for data analysis. Independent-samples t-test and one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed. Pearson correlation
coefficient was also calculated and we used forward linear regression as
multi-variable analysis. Values of less than 0.05 for two-tailed p
values were considered statistically significant. When using the
regression, we entered variables that had p value of 0.25 as setting it
as 0.5 can miss some variables that might be important (13).