The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychosomatic status of emeritus professors: The importance of active lifestyles, 2024, Takács et al

Abstract

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous negative impact on the psychosomatic status of the general population, and especially of more vulnerable populations, such as older people. The present study aimed to assess changes in psychosomatic status before and after the COVID-19 pandemic among emeritus professors over 70 years of age.

Materials/Methods
A total of 56 emeritus professors aged 77.4 ± 6.1 (74.1% male) participated in the study. The study was conducted between September 2022 and January 2023, after approximately two and a half years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sociodemographic characteristics, including socioeconomic status, were assessed in the questionnaire, along with active involvement in academic life and healthcare/sports. Physical and mental fatigue were assessed using a self-report questionnaire, and the impact of fatigue on physical and cognitive function was measured using the Fatigue Impact Scale. Participants evaluated their physical/mental fatigue and physical/cognitive function before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results
Among the participating emeritus professors, 15% reported higher levels of physical fatigue (Z = −1.992, P = 0.046, r = 0.28) and mental fatigue (Z = −2.154, P = 0.031, r = 0.31) following the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant difference was found in physical function assessed before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, t(51) = −2.986, P = 0.004, g = 0.22, while cognitive function showed a non-significant difference, t(51) = −1.265, P = 0.212, g = 0.12. After the COVID-19 pandemic, 26.9% of participants reported reduced physical function and 19.2% showed reduced cognitive function. Infection with the COVID-19 virus resulted in increased mental fatigue and reduced cognitive function among the participating emeritus professors.

Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic (and the introduction of restrictions on social activities) had a substantial and similar impact on the psychosomatic status of emeritus professors at both medical and sports universities. Furthermore, the reduction in physical and mental/cognitive function was exacerbated in those who were infected by SARS-CoV-2. Importantly, however, the overall impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was smaller in the population of emeritus professors than in the general elderly population. This may be due to the better maintenance of physical and mental activity in the former population, thus emphasising the importance of remaining physically and mentally active in old age, especially in the context of critical life events.

Open access: https://akjournals.com/view/journal...024.00060/article-10.1556-2066.2024.00060.xml

 

Haven't read it yet but the title sounds impressive. This is the same team @dave30th addressed once both on his blog and in a letter after this study where they "found" some unjustified causal relationship between physical activity and reduced number of symptoms after covid infection in young women.

This study, as others from this team on this subject, was funded by the Hungarian Ministry for Innovation and Technology and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The authors are a psychologist and a doctor interested in sports medicine.

Care to share your lived experience, @Jonathan Edwards and how your psychosomatic status is doing?

 

I like the sound of a psychosomatic status, I might develop one myself.

Not sure about thinking I'm an emeritus professor—people will ask me stuff, and I might be too wiped out to think up comedy answers—but there must be something nice that involves sitting down a lot and being ginger.

 

It looks as if by psychosomatic they simply mean mind and body - as in sound in mind and body.
In which case we all want to have a good psychosomatic status.

There is a saying that old soldiers never die - they just fade away.
Someone also said that old immunologists never die - they just lyse around.
What about emeritus professors - answers on a postcard before next Thursday please.

 

Try as I might, I cannot come up with a coherent description of what psychosomatic status even means. It seems to simply misuse the term in a weird way, and they only asked about physical and cognitive function, neither of which is psychological in the way it was asked.

It seems merely to want to blame the very limited social restrictions on what infections are causing. So many freeloaders in this profession.

 

Can't top Stephen Fry: "Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties."

 

It strikes me that emeritus professors will have more money throughout life and won't have had severe financial stress to deal with, and probably had a better than average diet throughout life too. I don't know if all emeritus professors have tenure, but certainly some of them will have had it, possibly even for a long time. So job security won't have been so much of a stressor in their lives as it is for the average person.

Generally speaking I would expect emeritus professors to have had better health than many of the population of similar age, so of course they would be likely to survive the pandemic in better shape than people with more difficult lives.

 

Not to mention their job has a lot of flexibility, and doesn’t require “working your body to death” like some manual labour roles. Additionally, they were much less likely to suffer from the pandemic-related firings and precariousness.

 

I was hopeful when I saw the title that someone had finally grasped the nettle and started investigating the psychosomatic researchers.

but instead we have this which focuses on the hypocrisy of the ideology. First rule of fight club: but when we get ill we expect to be treated biomedically because our research ideologies don’t apply to ‘people like us’ ?