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The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study

The strict lockdowns imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increase in levels of stress, anxiety, and depression in the general population. However, in a previous study, our group found that individuals with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HF-ASD) reported an increase in th...

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Autores principales: Nisticò, Veronica, Fior, Giulia, Faggioli, Raffaella, Priori, Alberto, Gambini, Orsola, Demartini, Benedetta
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9140581/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35627919
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10050782
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author Nisticò, Veronica
Fior, Giulia
Faggioli, Raffaella
Priori, Alberto
Gambini, Orsola
Demartini, Benedetta
author_facet Nisticò, Veronica
Fior, Giulia
Faggioli, Raffaella
Priori, Alberto
Gambini, Orsola
Demartini, Benedetta
author_sort Nisticò, Veronica
collection PubMed
description The strict lockdowns imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increase in levels of stress, anxiety, and depression in the general population. However, in a previous study, our group found that individuals with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HF-ASD) reported an increase in their psychological wellbeing and a decrease in their daily tiredness, in relation to the social distancing measures imposed during the first Italian lockdown (between March and May 2020). In this follow-up study, conducted during the “second wave” of COVID-19, we included the same group of individuals with HF-ASD and evaluated their levels of stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD-related symptoms, tiredness, and perceived wellbeing; moreover, we compared our results to the ones we obtained during the first lockdown on the same population. We found that individuals with HF-ASD experienced higher levels of the aforementioned psychiatric symptoms during the second lockdown, with respect to the first one. These levels positively correlated with their scores at the Autism Quotient subscale Attention Switching: hence, we speculated that these symptoms might be due not only to the prolonging of the social distancing measures, but also to the uncertainty that HF-ASD participants started experiencing at the end of the first lockdown.
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spelling pubmed-91405812022-05-28 The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study Nisticò, Veronica Fior, Giulia Faggioli, Raffaella Priori, Alberto Gambini, Orsola Demartini, Benedetta Healthcare (Basel) Article The strict lockdowns imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increase in levels of stress, anxiety, and depression in the general population. However, in a previous study, our group found that individuals with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HF-ASD) reported an increase in their psychological wellbeing and a decrease in their daily tiredness, in relation to the social distancing measures imposed during the first Italian lockdown (between March and May 2020). In this follow-up study, conducted during the “second wave” of COVID-19, we included the same group of individuals with HF-ASD and evaluated their levels of stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD-related symptoms, tiredness, and perceived wellbeing; moreover, we compared our results to the ones we obtained during the first lockdown on the same population. We found that individuals with HF-ASD experienced higher levels of the aforementioned psychiatric symptoms during the second lockdown, with respect to the first one. These levels positively correlated with their scores at the Autism Quotient subscale Attention Switching: hence, we speculated that these symptoms might be due not only to the prolonging of the social distancing measures, but also to the uncertainty that HF-ASD participants started experiencing at the end of the first lockdown. MDPI 2022-04-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9140581/ /pubmed/35627919 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10050782 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Nisticò, Veronica
Fior, Giulia
Faggioli, Raffaella
Priori, Alberto
Gambini, Orsola
Demartini, Benedetta
The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title_full The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title_fullStr The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title_full_unstemmed The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title_short The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 among a Sample of Italian Adults with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Follow-Up Study
title_sort psychological impact of covid-19 among a sample of italian adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder: a follow-up study
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9140581/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35627919
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10050782
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