Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms among COVID-19 survivors in Tunis

Introduction: In addition to physical problems, patients with COVID-19 suffer fromconsiderable stress throughout the disease crisis and could present psychiatric consequences even after their remission. Objective(s): To assess anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms among patients who had recovered from the acute COVID-19 infection in Tunisia. Method(s): A cross-sectional design included 50Tunisian adults who survived COVID-19 virus infection.Participants have been screened with a telephone interview 1 to 3months after a diagnosis of COVID- 19. We used a questionnaire including socio-psychological variables, presence of close relatives being infected, bereavement due to COVID-19 and post infection physical discomforts.The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) was used to investigate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Depression and anxiety were measured using The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scales (HADS). Result(s): The age of the participants ranged from 19 to 86 years.38% were female. Twelve percent (12%) of patients required hospitalization during COVID-19 infection. After a mean of 86.60 days (SD = 23) following the diagnosis, 28 % of patients reported clinically significant PTSD. The rates of depression and anxiety disorders in our population are 20% and 30%, respectively. Seventy percent of patients (70%) reported one or more post infection physical discomforts that the most common symptoms included Difficulty breathing and anosmia. Patients with PTSD, depression or anxiety had a more frequent history of a relative diagnosed positive for corona virus, a longer duration of infection, and more frequently post-infection physical discomfort Conclusion(s): Long-term psychological impact of COVID19 should not be ignored and mental health care could play an important role in rehabilitation.

Self-supervised Learning for COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-ray Images

Most of existing computer vision applications rely on models trained on supervised corpora, this is contradictory to what the world is seeing with the explosion of massive sets of unlabeled data. In the field of medical imaging for example, creating labels is extremely time-consuming because professionals should spend countless hours looking at images to manually annotate, segment, etc. Recently, several works are looking for solutions to the challenge of learning effective visual representations with no human supervision. In this work, we investigate the potential of using a self-supervised learning as a pretraining phase in improving the classification of radiographic images when the amount of available annotated data is small. To do that, we propose to use a self-supervised framework by pretraining a deep encoder with contrastive learning on a chest X-ray dataset using no labels at all, and then fine-tuning it using only few labeled data samples. We experimentally demonstrate that an unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled data is able to learn useful representation from Chest X-ray images, and only few labeled data samples are sufficient to reach the same accuracy of a supervised model learnt on the whole annotated dataset. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Religious coping in time of covid 19 in tunisia

IntroductionReligion belongs among well-documented coping strategies, through which one can understand and deal with stressors.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to examine religious coping responses face to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic among Tunisian people.MethodsThe survey was conducted using the online anonymous questionnaires and distributed through social networks from 24 April to 23 May 2020. It included sociodemographic questions, participants’ experience of SARS-CoV-2related stressful events and the frequency of religious practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brief RCOPE was used to assess religious coping.ResultsOur study included 80 participants: 71.3%female and 42.5%married. The mean age of the participants was 29.30 years (SD = 8.72). The religion of all participants was Islam, and 72.5% of them had religious practices. Participants reported much lower levels of negative religious coping than positive religious coping (5% versus 37.5%). There were no significant differences in religious coping activities as a function of gender (p=0.180, p= 0.192). Significant relationships were found only for demographic variables: level of education with Higher-educated reported more PRC (p=0.002). Having a family member with a suspected or confirmed infection was correlated with PRC (p=0.016).Concern with becoming infected or having a friend with a suspected or confirmed infection did not correlate with any coping strategy (p=0.112;p=0.489). No correlation was found between religious commitment and religious coping (p=0.897;p=0.504) however increasing religious activity during this pandemic was correlated with PRC (p=0.013).ConclusionsOur findings suggest that lockdown experience is associated with higher use of NRC strategies.

Anxiety on the lockdown resolution

IntroductionLockdown due to the management of infectious diseases such as corona virus disease affect mental health. We would think that with the end of the lockdown due to the corona virus pandemic, the feeling of regaining freedom and movement would be good for our morale.ObjectivesThrough this servery, we examine the prevalence of anxiety symptoms in the Tunisian population face to the end of lockdown.MethodsThe survey was conducted using the online anonymous questionnaires and distributed through social networks from 24 April to 23 May 2020(which was considered the end of the lockdown in Tunisia). It included socio-demographic questions and participants’ experience of SARS-CoV-2related stressful events (A member of your family was suspected of having Corona virus /someone you know had Corona virus‘s symptoms /You were quarantined). Anxiety symptoms were evaluated with the Hospital anxiety and depression scale-anxiety (HADS-A)ResultsOur study included 80 participants: 71.3% female and 42.5% married. The mean age of the participants was 29.30 years (SD = 8.72). The mean HADS-A score was 8.03 (SD=2.938) (maximum=16 minimum=1). Two-thirds of the participants exhibited anxiety symptoms (66.3%) with 1.3 % reported moderate severe anxiety symptoms. Anxiety was correlated with age and gender (p=0.013, p=0.027).ConclusionsOur results suggest that in this early phase of the COVID-19 lockdown resolution we can already observe its fundamental impact on anxiety.