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Mind Body Study: A Sub-Study on Psychosocial Factors and Microbiomes of Nurses in the Nurse's Health Study II

The Mind-Body Study is a sub-study of the Nurses' Health Study II (NHSII) which investigated associations between biomarkers and psychosocial factors. The prevalences of clinically meaningful depressive symptoms, mild-to-severe anxiety symptoms, experiencing major-life discrimination, and food addiction were 19%, 21%, 30%, and 5% respectively. These participants were more likely to have experienced childhood abuse and take psychotropic medications but less likely to have chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension than participants in the larger NHSII cohort. Participants (n = 213, mean age = 60.6) provided one or two separate stool samples for microbiome profiling between 2013 and 2014, and completed two online psychosocial assessments 10 months apart. The participants also completed two 30-day FFQs around the two microbiome collections. There was excellent reproducibility of psychosocial factors over 1 year. Moderate-to-strong positive correlations were observed between markers of distress and between positive psychosocial factors such as mindfulness and optimism. Here, the subjects' metadata including phenotypic and diet covariates have been provided. Microbial DNA sequence data from the stool microbiome collections is provided via Sequence Read Archive (SRA).