We’ve all heard about the physical effects of COVID-19, which can include loss of smell and taste, trouble breathing, coughing and fever. But what about the mental effects? For her study, New Rochelle High School senior Jessica Shapiro considered how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the mental health of pediatric cancer patients and their parents.
Shapiro’s research involved creating a survey with the help of her mentor, Jean Mulcahy Levy, MD, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado. The survey was then sent to several pediatric cancer patients, the parents of pediatric cancer patients and pediatric non-cancer patients.
She used a crowdsourcing marketplace called Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect the responses, then organized the data in Google Sheets. Lastly, she ran data analysis on the information, which yielded some interesting results.
“I found that pediatric cancer patients are more afraid during school than the pediatric non-cancer participant group (children who did not have cancer between 13 and 18 years old),” Shapiro said. “I also found that both pediatric cancer patients and their parents experienced higher levels of concern about becoming infected with COVID-19. Pediatric cancer patients and their parents also showed higher levels of fear, anxiety and stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Shapiro has had an interest in pediatrics since childhood and aspires to be a pediatric surgeon. She decided to study the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer patients because one of her family members suffers from pancreatic cancer.
Shapiro thanked New Rochelle’s Science Research Program and its director, Jeff Wuebber, for providing her with guidance and direction. “Before the [Science Research Program], I hadn’t really thought about research in college all that much,” she said. “But now, I know for sure that I want to pursue research opportunities while in college.”
