COVID-19-related anxiety disorder in Iraq during the pandemic: an online cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 outbreak is an unprecedented global public health burden, which popped up in China in late 2019 to early 2020 and distributed worldwide rapidly. Indeed, this pandemic transmission has raised global physical and mental health concerns. Mental health issues that concur with this public health emergency may pose anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. In Iraq, there are no registered known data on the psychological consequence of the public during the communicable disease outbreak. The ongoing study aims to address the paucity of these data as an appraisal of the mental health burden represented by anxiety disorder related to the global COVID-19 era. RESULTS: Among the 1591 Iraqi respondents, 788 (49.5%) accounted for having health anxiety over the current home restriction situation. Younger ages experienced more COVID-19-related health anxiety compared to older ages. Females reported higher health anxiety compared to males (57.7% vs 42.3%). The health care professionals reported 20.9% health anxiety. The Iraqi southern population displayed more health anxiety compared to the northern and middle portions. This work showed about half of the respondents were spending over 60 min focusing on news of COVID-19. We found that 80 to 90% carrying out preventive efforts and home quarantine against COVID-19 infection. Interestingly, participants experienced fear from the risk of COVID-19 infection, whether more or equal to a level of war scare, in 70.1% of the sample. CONCLUSIONS: In Iraq, during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the respondents have health anxiety. Southern Iraqi cities displayed higher rates of anxiety. Also, being female, younger ages, holding an academic degree, or being a college student are associated with more prominent degrees of anxiety. Furtherly, it is important to adopt strategies for public health education and prevention and alerting future governmental responses focusing on psychological state impact among the general population.