Study on the Quality Characteristics of Preprocessed, Cooked and Frozen-Reheated Tofu Balls.

There are concerns that COVID-19 may have affected mental health among certain groups, including women and gender-diverse individuals (transgender, nonbinary), disproportionately. The most comprehensive systematic review that compared mental health symptom changes from before the COVID-19 pandemic to during the pandemic found that changes overall and by subgroups were small (standardized mean differences [SMDs] = 0.05-0.22). Females and women were the only group with statistically significant declines across all 3 mental health categories evaluated, including general mental health (6 cohorts; 10 329 participants; SMD = 0.22 [95% CI, 0.08-0.35]), anxiety symptoms (5 cohorts; 3500 participants; SMD = 0.20 [95% CI, 0.12-0.29]), and depression symptoms (7 cohorts; 3851 participants; SMD = 0.22 [95% CI, 0.05-0.40]). Changes were evaluated separately for women and men but not directly compared since most change estimates for each sex or gender group came from different studies. A substudy of that systematic review evaluated studies with data that allowed direct comparisons of differences in SMD changes among women vs men and found significantly greater worsening for women in general mental health (3 cohorts; 15 692 participants; SMD = 0.15 [95% CI, 0.12 to 0.18]) and anxiety symptoms (4 cohorts; 4344 participants; SMD = 0.15 [95% CI, 0.07 to 0.22]) but not depression symptoms (4 cohorts; 4475 participants; SMD = 0.12 [95% CI, −0.09 to 0.33]) or stress (4 cohorts; 1533 participants; SMD = −0.10 [95% CI, −0.21 to 0.01]). That analysis, however, included only evidence from searches up to August 30, 2021, and no analysis included more than 4 cohorts. We did not identify any other studies that directly compared changes by sex or gender. Objectives were to update our substudy and compare changes by sex or gender from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic on continuously measured scale scores and proportions above cutoffs for general mental health, anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, and stress. The main systematic review was registered with PROSPERO (), and a protocol was posted prior to initiating searches (see Additional Information). The present systematic review and meta-analysis is a substudy. Results are reported per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses () reporting guideline. Methods were adopted from the main systematic review and from a study by investigators from our team of a previous sex or gender comparison. Thus, we followed Text Recycling Research Project reporting guidance. Research ethics approval was not required since the study evaluated previously published summary statistics.