Psychological, endocrine and polygenic predictors of emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in a longitudinal birth cohort

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Abstract

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2022.02.03.22270311: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: The Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the University of Heidelberg approved the study.
    Consent: Before participation, all families provided written informed consent.
    Sex as a biological variable410 pregnant women about 4-8 weeks prior to delivery were recruited for the first study wave (T1) from October 2010 to March 2013, at three obstetric clinics in the Rhine-Neckar Region of Germany.
    RandomizationA SNP set filtered for high quality SNPs (MAF > 0.20, missingness = 0, HWE p > 0.02) and LD pruning (pairwise r2 < 0.1 within a 200 SNP window) was used to filter for relatedness and population structure and cryptically related (π□ > 0.20) subjects were excluded at random.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power AnalysisA post-hoc power analysis was calculated for the primary hypothesis, emotional well-being of children, using GPower 3.1.9.7

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The online survey was created with REDCap, a web application for building and managing online surveys (Harris et al., 2019).
    REDCap
    suggested: (REDCap, RRID:SCR_003445)
    Quality control and filtering was performed using PLINK 1.9 (Chang et al., 2015), according to recommendations published in Turner et al. (Turner et al., 2011).
    PLINK
    suggested: (PLINK, RRID:SCR_001757)
    PRSs for depression (PRS-DEP), schizophrenia (PRS-Schizophrenia) and loneliness (PRS-Loneliness) were calculated using PRSice 2.1.6 (Choi and O’Reilly, 2019).
    PRSice
    suggested: (PRSice, RRID:SCR_017057)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    The present study has several limitations. First, data acquisition only took place online or via mailed questionnaires. None of the participants were interviewed face to face, due to the restrictions. Second, the children did not answer the questions themselves. The main parent caregiver, in most cases the mother, answered the questions about the child. There is possible bias as answers about the emotional well-being of the child are influenced by the caregiver’s perspective and his/her own mental distress (De Los Reyes and Kazdin, 2005). In particular, the association between the mother’s and the child’s well-being could be affected by that bias. Third, there were only two assessments. Since the pandemic is not over, it would be interesting to pursue the course of mental health linked to the prevailing circumstances. Fourth, the questionnaires assessing three months prior to the pandemic were answered retrospectively, therefore biases and pitfalls could emerge from that assessment. Fifth, our sample had limited diversity (mostly high educational background and high socio-economic status) and may not be representative of the general population. The present study is among the first longitudinal birth cohort studies assessing the impact of prenatal stress on children’s emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of internationally established and validated screening instruments to assess mental health enables comparison with other studies. The study contributes t...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.


    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.