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Health measures instantiated to reduce the spread of COVID-19 have imposed significant constraints for the population and impacted on drinking habits and mental health. This study longitudinally compared changes in alcohol consumption before and after the COVID-19 outbreak and the impact of sociodemographic and mental health variables on such changes among a community sample of young adults. Data were collected in the context of a larger, ongoing longitudinal study. The sample consisted of 305 young adults from Spain aged between 18 and 26 years (mean age = 21.27, (SD = 2.21), female = 53.4%; college students = 61.6%) who completed first (November-2019 and February-2020; i.e., before the outbreak of COVID-19) and second follow-up questionnaires (March 2021, a year after the COVID-19 outbreak). Alcohol use (quantity and drinking frequency), depression and anxiety symptoms were measured. Quantity and frequency of alcohol use decreased from the pre- to post-COVID-19 period. A decrease in drinking frequency was observed among college students, but not in noncollege peers. Although we found no effect of pre-COVID-19 anxiety on alcohol use changes, those with more depressive symptoms at the pre-COVID assessment were more resistant to decreasing their drinking quantity and frequency after the COVID-19 outbreak. This information will be of value when designing interventions aimed at reducing harmful alcohol use and highlights the role of mental health status when identifying high risk populations of young-adults during this, and future, public health crises.

Home confinement during the COVID-19 crisis causes problems in everyday life that can affect people's mental health. In this context, the purpose of this study was (1) to identify the most frequent problems experienced during the home confinement, (2) to analyse whether these problems vary according to socio-demographics; and (3) to study the influence of home confinement on mental health. One thousand five hundred sixty-nine participants living in Spain during the COVID-19 lockdown answered an online survey including questions about socio-demographics, problems of home confinement and mental health. We used factor analysis to group the home confinement problems into identifiable categories. Descriptive and inferential statistical methods for comparison between socio-demographics were used, and the influence of subsets of home confinement problems on mental health was analysed by multiple linear regression.The 16 evaluated problems were grouped into three factors: “Anger and Frustration”, “Deprivation of Social Contact”, and “Living Together Issues”. The most frequent problem was “missing somebody”, while “being afraid of going mad” was the least frequent one. Women, young people, people with less space at home, and teleworkers and non-working people during the lockdown period reported more home confinement problems. The Anger and Frustration factor was the one most related to mental health. These results highlighted the problems that people had to face during home confinement and their influence on mental health. Finally, the paper suggests designing specific strategies to cope with these problems according to participants’ socio-demographics.

Background and aimsYouth gambling research mainly focuses on the illegal use of age-restricted machines, but coin pusher and crane grab machines are gambling machines that can be used by people of any age in the UK, and are also in use internationally. Previous cross-sectional evidence has associated recollected childhood usage of these machines with adult gambling participation and levels of problem gambling amongst adult gamblers. We attempted to conceptually replicate the findings of one of these studies (Newall et al., 2021), while addressing some limitations of that study.MethodsA cross-sectional survey of 2,000 UK-based and -born participants aged 19–24 years. The measures were participants' recollected usage of coin pusher and crane grab machines as a child, whether they had gambled in the past 12-months or not, and the PGSI for past 12-month gamblers.ResultsOverall, 5 of 7 tested associations were significant and in the hypothesized direction. Logistic regression models showed that adult gamblers were more likely to recollect using, and used at higher levels of frequency, coin pusher and crane grab machines, than non-gamblers. Then, negative binomial regression analysis showed that adults who recollected using crane grab machines at higher levels of frequency showed more gambling-related problems.Discussion and ConclusionsThese results suggest that childhood usage of coin pusher and crane grab machines may act as an underappreciated risk factor for the development of gambling-related harm across the lifespan. This information may be considered for further youth gambling research and policy.