Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Celina Goyeneche | email: goyeneche.celina@gmail.com
Celina Goyeneche 1°2°, Alejo Barbuzza 1°2°, Victoria Reppucci 1°, Franco Moscato 1°, Jorge H. Medina 1°2°, Cynthia Katche 1°2°, Fabricio Ballarini 1°2°, Diego Moncada 3°4°, Haydeé Viola 1°2°5°
1° Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2° Instituto de Biología Celular y Neurociencia “Prof. E. De Robertis” (IBCN), Facultad de Medicina, UBA-CONICET, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
3° Centro Integrativo de Biología y Química Aplicada, Universidad Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago, Chile.
4° Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular “Dr. Héctor Maldonado” (FBMC), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, UBA, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
5° Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular “Dr. Héctor Maldonado” (FBMC), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, UBA, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating. From its start in March 2020 to June 2022, the coronavirus infected 530 million people worldwide, and 6.3 of them died of derived pulmonary and cardiorespiratory diseases. In addition, diverse neurological symptoms such as high prevalence of insomnia, and several psychological distresses also occurred in global population. Recently, a controversy emerged regarding the duration of generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) and depressive symptoms observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two opposing postulates have been raised: one says that these symptoms last a short time; others, on the contrary, reported that the symptoms lasted at least a year. The main goal of our present work was to study the dynamics of psychosocial impact along the three outbreaks of COVID-19 on adult Argentine population throughout 19 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We carried out a repeated cross sectional study to determine the time course of the GAD and depression records. We observed that a high increase in GAD and depression symptoms accompanied the second wave of contagions and that a sharp decline in these levels was parallel to the third wave. The women young adult group was the most vulnerable. The increment in the vaccine doses inoculated between the last two waves of contagion was associated with a decrease of score for GAD and depressive symptoms, suggesting that the vaccines also plays a protective role on mental health.