UCLA

Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) face sociopolitical hardships that can manifest into a Homonegativity, a form of psychological distress. As Homonegativity is associated with poor mental health outcomes, it could also extend into physiological outcomes like obesity where the relationship would hypothetically be positively correlated. Participants of this study come from the mStudy, a Los Angeles based cohort focusing on young MSM of color. Logistic Regression was used to analyze the association between Homonegativity and obesity (defined as having a Body Mass Index ≥ 30), where quasibinomial and generalized additive models (GAMs) were used to assess the robustness of the logistic regression. Increasing Homonegativity was associated with about 3.5% lower odds (OR: 0.965, CI: 0.94-0.99) for both unadjusted and fully adjusted models, a finding contrary to the original hypothesis.