Food allergies are a growing health concern, but their implications for daily psychological functioning are unknown. This micro-longitudinal study investigated the daily frequency of food allergy issues and how this related to experiences of stress, mood, and physical energy.
108 adults with physician-diagnosed food allergies completed an initial Internet survey followed by a 2-week Internet daily diary survey.
The initial survey collected socio-demographic and food allergy information. The daily survey collected information about the participants' experiences of stress, mood, physical energy, and food allergy issues during that day.
Commonly experienced allergy issues included negative physical symptoms, higher food prices, anxiety about safety of food, trouble maintaining a healthy diet, and anxiety/stress at social occasions. Furthermore, multilevel modelling analyses showed that stress and negative mood were significantly higher on days with more allergy issues. Older adults experienced lower positive mood and physical energy on days with more issues.
This is the first study to incorporate near to real-time tracking to examine the frequency of food allergy issues and the implications for daily psychological functioning. Targeting the issues we identified could reduce stress in patients with food allergies and improve their overall quality of life.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 26 February 2016.
All research outputs
#22,072,352
of 34,410,798 outputs
Outputs from Psychology & Health
#930
of 1,334 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#189,424
of 336,703 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Psychology & Health
#13
of 26 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,410,798 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 35th percentile – i.e., 35% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,334 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.9. This one is in the 29th percentile – i.e., 29% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 336,703 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 43rd percentile – i.e., 43% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 26 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 50% of its contemporaries.
