Demographic information:
The questionnaire consisted of three sections; the first one included the general demographic information which were age, sex, academic year (preparatory, preclinical, clinical and internship year), occupation if had one, regular smoking (yes or no question) and habits such as the frequency of drinking coffee, tea, and alcohol. The second one included Zung self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) (9), while the third section included Yale-Brown OCD Scale (YBCOS) questions (10).
An Arabic version of SAS was used in this study which is a screening tool for anxiety (11). We also added a choice for each question that allowed the participant to declare whether they had these symptoms before COVID-19 as well. Each question had a score from 1 to 4 depending on the answer. A score of 36 or higher indicated the need for a medical assessment for GAD and the total score was 80 (9).
An Arabic version produced by native Arabic speakers of the Obsessive-Compulsive Test YBOCS was used to assess obsessive-compulsive disorder (12). YBOCS rates the severity and type of symptoms in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Each option of each question of this scale was recoded into numbers from 0 to 4. The total score determines whether the participant had no OCD, mild, moderate, severe, or extreme OCD and the total score was 40 (9).
Data analysis:
We used IBM SPSS software, version 26 for Windows (IBM Corp.: Armonk, New York) for data analysis. Independent-samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed. Pearson correlation coefficient was also calculated and we used forward linear regression as multi-variable analysis. Values of less than 0.05 for two-tailed p values were considered statistically significant. When using the regression, we entered variables that had p value of 0.25 as setting it as 0.5 can miss some variables that might be important (13).