OBJECTIVES: To investigate the prevalence of suicidal ideation and its factors in first-year Chinese university students from a vocational college in Zhejiang during the COVID-19 pandemic.
METHODS: Using a cluster sampling technique, a university-wide survey was conducted of 686 first-year university students from Hangzhou in March 2020 using University Personality Inventory (UPI). UPI includes an assessment for suicidal ideation and possible risk factors. Suicidal ideation prevalence was calculated for males and females. Univariate analysis and multivariable logistic regression models were conducted, adjusting for age and sex. Analyses were carried out using the SPSS version 22.0 software.
RESULTS: The prevalence of 12-month suicidal ideation among first-year university students during March 2020 was 5.2%, and there was no significant difference between males and females (4.8% vs. 6.0%, x2 = 0.28, p = 0.597). Multivariable logistic regression analysis identified social avoidance (B = 0.78, OR = 2.17, p < 0.001) and emotional vulnerability (B = 0.71, OR = 2.02, p < 0.001) as positively associated with suicidal ideation.
CONCLUSIONS: Social avoidance and emotional vulnerabilities are unique factors associated with greater suicidal ideation among first-year university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. UPI serves as a validated tool to screen suicide risks among Chinese university students. Encouraging social engagement and improving emotional regulation skills are promising targets to reduce suicidal ideation among first-year university students.
METHOD: Eleven focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted with a purposive sample of 89 participants aged > 50 from the major ethnic groups in the Segamat District, Johor State. FGDs were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and translated into English. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.
RESULTS: We identified trust in doctors as a key reason for whether or not to seek health care. Generally, the participants had low awareness of CRC sign/symptoms and screening. Emotional and logistic concerns about sending a stool sample to a clinic emerged as the main barriers to screening. Simplified illustrated instructions about stool collection in Malay, Chinese and Tamil, free screening at health clinics and reminders to complete the iFOBT test were perceived to facilitate engagement in screening, and posited as strategies that were likely to increase iFOBT uptake.
CONCLUSION: Primary care physicians play a crucial role in terms of reducing patient's misperceptions, recommending screening to patients, enhancing attendance, and improving uptake of CRC screening. There is a need for further research to investigate ways in which to reduce identified barriers and implement and test potential facilitative strategies as well as examine adherence by doctors to clinical guidelines about CRC screening.
OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the prevalence and associated sociodemographic and clinical factors of depression symptoms in women newly diagnosed with breast cancer.
METHODS: 162 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients at the oncology center in Almaty were recruited for this study. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire on sociodemographic and clinical information and the Beck Depression Inventory-II scale.
RESULTS: The mean age of the patients was 54.41 years (SD=8.1). 95% of participants had unilateral breast cancer, and 79% of participants had stage I or stage II breast cancer. 73% of patients said that they do not have reliable social support. 46% of patients had symptoms of moderate depression, and 31% of patients had symptoms of severe depression. According to the multivariate analysis, factors associated with depression symptoms were: social status, household income level, reliability of social support, and stage of breast cancer.
CONCLUSION: The prevalence of depression symptoms is very high among newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. Unemployed or retired patients, with a lower household income, and no reliable social support diagnosed with an advanced stage of breast cancer are especially at high risk for developing depression.
METHOD: This cross-sectional study was conducted between February 15, 2022 and March 15, 2022, among 394 healthcare workers from Putrajaya and Selangor hospitals, Malaysia. Maslach Burnout Inventory, World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF 26 inventory, and Brief Resilience Scale were utilized to capture information on burnout, quality of life, and resilience, respectively.
RESULTS: The mean score of physical health of participants who work more than 10 h (11.38) is lower than participants who work from 8 to 10 h (13.00) and participants who work 7 h daily (13.03), p-value < 0.001. Similarly, the mean score of psychological health of participants who work more than 10 h (12.35) is lower than participants who work from 8 to 10 h (13.72) and participants who work 7 h daily (13.68), p-value = 0.001. Higher income levels were associated with high resilience and quality of life.
CONCLUSION: It is imperative that healthcare practitioners and policy makers adopt and implement interventions to promote a healthy workplace environment, address ethical concerns, and prevent burnout among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Managing the issue of long working hours could possibly result in improved resilience, burnout, and quality of life among healthcare workers. Despite this study able to tickle out some policy specific areas where interventions are needed, identifying effective solutions and evaluating their efficiency will require larger and interventional studies.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: We propose a mixed-method study of mental health assessment that combines psychological questionnaires with facial emotion analysis to comprehensively evaluate the mental health of students on a large scale. The Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale-21(DASS-21) is used for the psychological questionnaire. The facial emotion recognition model is implemented by transfer learning based on neural networks, and the model is pre-trained using FER2013 and CFEE datasets. Among them, the FER2013 dataset consists of 48 × 48-pixel face gray images, a total of 35,887 face images. The CFEE dataset contains 950,000 facial images with annotated action units (au). Using a random sampling strategy, we sent online questionnaires to 400 college students and received 374 responses, and the response rate was 93.5%. After pre-processing, 350 results were available, including 187 male and 153 female students. First, the facial emotion data of students were collected in an online questionnaire test. Then, a pre-trained model was used for emotion recognition. Finally, the online psychological questionnaire scores and the facial emotion recognition model scores were collated to give a comprehensive psychological evaluation score.
RESULTS: The experimental results of the facial emotion recognition model proposed to show that its classification results are broadly consistent with the mental health survey results. This model can be used to improve efficiency. In particular, the accuracy of the facial emotion recognition model proposed in this paper is higher than that of the general mental health model, which only uses the traditional single questionnaire. Furthermore, the absolute errors of this study in the three symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress are lower than other mental health survey results and are only 0.8%, 8.1%, 3.5%, and 1.8%, respectively.
CONCLUSION: The mixed method combining intelligent methods and scales for mental health assessment has high recognition accuracy. Therefore, it can support efficient large-scale screening of students' psychological problems.
METHODS: This was a quasi-experimental study with university students as participants. Intervention group participants were instructed to complete online questionnaires which covered basic demographics and instruments assessing depression, anxiety, stress, mindfulness, psychological flexibility, and fear of COVID-19 before and after the one-hour intervention. The control group also completed before and after questionnaires and were subsequently crossed over to the intervention group. Repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to assess time*group effects.
RESULTS: 118 participants were involved in this study. There were significant differences in anxiety (F(1,116) = 34.361, p < 0.001, partial eta-squared = 0.229) and psychological flexibility between the two groups (F(1,116) = 11.010, p = 0.001, partial eta-squared = 0.087), while there were no differences in depression, stress, mindfulness, or fear of COVID-19.
CONCLUSION: The results of this study corroborate the efficacy of online single-session mindfulness therapy as a viable short-term psychological intervention under financial and time constraints. Since university students are in the age group with the highest incidence of depressive and anxiety disorders, it is crucial to utilize resources to address as many students as possible to ensure maximum benefit.
METHODS: We modified a validated questionnaire with permission from the original authors at Melaka Manipal Medical College, Melaka, Malaysia. Participants rated 35 characteristics on a 5-point Likert scale. The modified questionnaire was validated in a pilot pool of medical students (n = 69), with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.90, and administered to Year 1-5 medical students (n = 917) at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
RESULTS: Based on the proportion of favourable Likert scoring, four top desirable characteristics were common across Year 1-5 students: good communication skills (84.4%); sound knowledge of subject (82.7%); enthusiasm (78.4%); and providing effective explanations (74.4%). Approachability (p = 0.005), encouraging participation (p < 0.001) and constructive criticism (p < 0.001) were more important to clinical students (Year 3-5) than preclinical students (Year 1-2).
CONCLUSION: The top four characteristics were consistent across all years of medical students in this study. Characteristics emphasised in the clinical years facilitate active learner participation, consistent with constructivist learning theory.
AIM: To assess the Malay-translated version of the ACDAS, postadaptation into the local context and validation by the content and construct experts.
DESIGN: The English ACDAS was translated into Malay first through forward translation and then through backward translation. The prefinal translated version of the instrument was designed, with the participation of 61 children and 61 parents or legal guardians. Subsequently, a final cross-cultural adaptation of the instrument was then made for another group of participants and evaluated for validity and test-retest reliability among 144 children and 144 parents or legal guardians participating in the self-report feedback process at the Paediatric Dental Clinic, Faculty of Dentistry, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The cross-cultural adaptation of the instrument considered translating to Malaysian national language and adapting to its culture.
RESULTS: The Malay-translated ACDAS consisted of 19 items. The translated version of Malaysian-ACDAS (MY-ACDAS) achieved an acceptable agreement between six expert committee members with an internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha value, αconsistency) of 0.839. The test-retest reliability results of all participants support semantic and conceptual equivalence as an accepted construct validity between the children, parents and DHPs across the multicultural Malaysian population.
CONCLUSION: The MY-ACDAS is a valid and reliable scale for measuring dental anxiety among Malaysian children.
OBJECTIVE: This study aims to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of a digital parenting program (called Naungan Kasih in Bahasa Melayu [Protection through Love]) delivered in Malaysia, with varying combinations of 2 components included to encourage engagement. The study is framed around the following objectives: (1) to determine the recruitment, retention, and engagement rates in each intervention condition; (2) to document implementation fidelity; (3) to explore program acceptability among key stakeholders; (4) to estimate intervention costs; and (5) to provide indications of the effectiveness of the 2 components.
METHODS: This 10-week factorial cluster randomized trial compares ParentText, a chatbot that delivers parenting and family violence prevention content to caregivers of preschool-aged children in combination with 2 engagement components: (1) a WhatsApp support group and (2) either 1 or 2 in-person sessions. The trial aims to recruit 160 primary and 160 secondary caregivers of children aged 4-6 years from 8 schools split equally across 2 locations: Kuala Lumpur and Negeri Sembilan. The primary outcomes concern the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and its components, including recruitment, retention, and engagement. The effectiveness outcomes include caregiver parenting practices, mental health and relationship quality, and child development. The evaluation involves mixed methods: quantitative caregiver surveys, digitally tracked engagement data of caregivers' use of the digital intervention components, direct assessments of children, and focus group discussions with caregivers and key stakeholders.
RESULTS: Overall, 208 parents were recruited at baseline December 2023: 151 (72.6%) primary caregivers and 57 (27.4%) secondary caregivers. In January 2024, of these 208 parents, 168 (80.8%) enrolled in the program, which was completed in February. Postintervention data collection was completed in March 2024. Findings will be reported in the second half of 2024.
CONCLUSIONS: This is the first factorial cluster randomized trial to assess the feasibility of a hybrid human-digital playful parenting program in Southeast Asia. The results will inform a large-scale optimization trial to establish the most effective, cost-effective, and scalable version of the intervention.
TRIAL REGISTRATION: OSF Registries; https://osf.io/f32ky.
INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/55491.
METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted in three paediatric oncology centres in Malaysia from September 2020 until December 2022. A total of 167 parents were recruited. Parents completed a set of questionnaires to assess their perception on effect of COVID-19 infection to children with cancer and COVID Stress Scale (CSS) to assess the parents' stress level.
RESULTS: Patients' mean age at study entry was 8.75 years (SD 4.38). Ninety-one (54.5%) patients were still on active treatment. More than 80% of the parents obtained information regarding COVID-19 infection from mass media and social networking. Fear of their children contracting COVID-19 infection was high especially among patients who were still on treatment. Forty-nine (29.3%) parents were significantly affected by the pandemic leading to loss of job or monthly income. Twenty-nine (17.4%) patients required treatment modification during the pandemic. The median total score for CSS was 78.0 (IQR 25th 64.0; 75th 95.0). Ninety-one (54.5%) respondents were very/extremely stressed based on the CSS scores. Components with high scores were xenophobia (median score 18.0; IQR 25th 13.0, 75th 22.0), fear of danger (median score 17.0; IQR 25th 14.0, 75th 20.0) and contamination fears (median score 16.0; IQR 25th 12.0, 75th 19.0). Lower household income was associated with higher stress level (p = 0.006).
CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrated high awareness regarding risk of COVID-19 infection among parents of oncology children. Half of the parents had high stress level, with low household income identified as a factor associated with high stress level.