Coping strategies patterns to buffer the psychological impact of the State of Emergency in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic's early months.

Coping style represents the cognitive and behavioral patterns to manage particular demands appraised as taxing the resources of individuals. Studies report associations between certain coping styles and levels of adjustment of anxious symptomatology and emotional distress. The main objective of this study was to analyze behavioral co-occurrent patterns and relationships in the coping strategies used to deal with psychological distress displayed by the Spanish adult population during the first State of Emergency and lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a cross-sectional study that uses selective methodology complemented with an indirect observational methodology, with a nomothetic/punctual/unidimensional design. We collected 996 surveys from 19 out of the 22 autonomous regions in Spain. We focused the analysis on sociodemographic variables, cumulative incidence of the COVID-19 disease and psychological distress variables. We performed two different inferential analyses: Lag sequential analysis to define the participant coping patterns, and polar coordinate analysis to study the interrelationship of the focal behavior with conditioned behaviors. We found behavioral co-occurrent patterns of coping strategies with problem avoidance being found as the coping strategy most frequently engaged by participants. Interestingly, the problem avoidance strategy was not associated with lower anxious symptomatology. By contrast, emotion-focused strategies such as express emotions and social support were associated with higher anxious symptomatology. Our findings underscore the importance of furthering our understanding of coping as a way to aid psychological distress during global public health emergencies.

Proceedings of the Tenth International Meeting on Neuroacanthocytosis Syndromes.

The 10th International Meeting on Neuroacanthocytosis Syndromes was held online on March 10th12th, 2021. The COVID19 pandemic situation made our planned meeting in Barcelona on March 2020 to be suspended by one year, and finally took place online. The meeting followed the previous nine international symposia, the last of which was held in Dresden, Germany in March, 2018. The setting of the meeting encouraged interactions, exchange of ideas and networking opportunities among the high number of participants from around the globe, including scientists, neurologists and specially patients and caregivers. A total of 27 oral communications were distributed in 8 sessions with topics ranging from molecular and cellular functions of VPS13 genes and proteins, their involvement in Neuroacanthocytosis Syndromes and finally clinical aspects and patients care. In addition, 5 posters were presented. Altogether, scientists and neurologists discussed recent advances and set the bases for next steps, action points, and future studies in close collaboration with the patients associations, which are always actively involved in the whole process.