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The prevalence of depression and anxiety have been shown to be higher in the urban population compared with the rural population. The present study investigated the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and depression with comorbid anxiety and their associated factors in a random sample drawn from several urban communities in Malaysia. This study also compared the odds of developing depression, anxiety, and depression with comorbid anxiety before and after the emergence of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We recruited 326 participants who were administered a sociodemographic characteristics questionnaire, the 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21), to assess the presence or absence of depression, anxiety, and depression with comorbid anxiety, and the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQoL-BREF) to assess their QoL. The following prevalence values were obtained among the participants: depression, 23.9%; anxiety, 41.7%; and depression with comorbid anxiety, 19.9%. The factors significantly associated with higher odds of psychological complications included those assessed after the emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic and the presence of comorbid stress. Higher physical health-related QoL, psychological QoL, and environment-related QoL reduced the odds of psychological complications. Based on our findings, we recommended a few measures to curb psychological complications among the urban population, particularly as the battle to contain COVID-19 is still ongoing.

The understanding that fluid ingestion attenuates thermoregulatory and circulatory stress during exercise in the heat was based on studies conducted in relatively dry (∼50% RH) environments. It remains undetermined whether similar effects occur during exercise in a warm and more humid environment, where evaporative capacity is reduced. Nine well-trained, unacclimatised male runners were randomly assigned to perform four experimental trials where they ran for 60 min at an intensity of 70% VO 2 max followed by an incremental exercise test until volitional exhaustion. The four trials consisted of non-fluid ingestion (NF) and fluid ingestion (FI) in a warm-dry (WD) and warm-humid condition (WH). Time to exhaustion (TTE), body temperature (T b ), whole body sweat rate, partitional calorimetry measures, heart rate and plasma volume were recorded during exercise. There was no significant difference in T b following 60 min of exercise in FI and NF trial within both WD (37.3°C ± 0.4 vs. 37.4°C ± 0.3; p > 0.05) and WH conditions (38.0°C ± 0.4 vs. 38.1°C ± 0.4; p > 0.05). The TTE was similar between FI and NF trials in both WH and WD, whereas exercise capacity was significantly shorter in WH than WD (9.1 ± 2.8 min vs. 12.7 ± 2.4 min, respectively; p = 0.01). Fluid ingestion failed to provide any ergogenic benefit in attenuating thermoregulatory and circulatory stress during exercise in the WH and WD conditions. Consequently, exercise performance was not enhanced with fluid ingestion in the warm-humid condition, although the humid environment detrimentally affected exercise endurance.