Data for the study "Latent toxoplasmosis is associated with a higher level of perceived stress in men but not women, is not associated with anxiety and is associated with worse mental health"

Latent and probably life-long infection with <i>Toxoplasma</i>, which affects about one-third of the human population, has many specific effects on the personality and behavior of infected humans. The stress-coping hypothesis was suggested to explain why many of the toxoplasmosis-associated behavioral changes go in opposite directions in men and women. This hypothesis suggests that toxoplasmosis impairs the health of humans, which results in mild chronic stress. It is known that men and women cope with stress in opposite ways. The first presumption of the hypothesis, impaired health, has been confirmed in many studies over the past 15 years. The second, higher level of stress in infected subjects, has been tested only rarely. Here we compared levels of stress, measured with the Perceived Stress Scale, and anxiety, measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory X-2, in a nonclinical population of 614 <i>Toxoplasma</i>-free and 162 <i>Toxoplasma</i>-infected subjects. We found a higher level of stress in men, but not in women. However, we also found that physical health had a positive rather than negative effect on stress when mental health is controlled, which seems to contradict the prediction of the original stress-coping hypothesis. No differences were found in the anxiety of infected and noninfected men or women. In agreement with previously published data, both <i>Toxoplasma</i>-infected Rh-negative men and women had worse mental health than corresponding <i>Toxoplasma</i>-free controls.Between 28. 9. 2020 and 13. 4. 2021, the questionnaire was completed or partially completed by 6000 subjects, 5200 of them during October and November 2020. After filtering out all subjects who were younger than 18, did not provide information about toxoplasmosis or Rh phenotype, skipped more than four questions in STAI or more than two questions in PSS, or answered nearly all questions in STAI or PSS with the same code, we calculated average anxiety and stress as the arithmetic means of answers of STAI and PSS questionnaire (after the inversion of scales of questions 1, 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19 for STAI and 4, 5, 7, 8 for PSS). These means were multiplied by the number of questions in a particular questionnaire (20 in the case of STAI and 10 in the case of PSS) to allow comparison to published data. The final data set contained data from 776 subjects who mostly completed both questionnaires. <br>