Abstract
Background:
Medical students are a population who are at great risk to develop sleep disrup-tion due to demanding clinical and academic duties. Knowing how much change in sleep wake pattern is associated with subsequent psychological distress could be useful to establish a systematic mental health program in medical schools.Methods:
We performed a cross-sectional study to identify the sleep quality and its correla-tion to psychological distress among 159 medical students.The instruments employed for data collection were a self report sleep- wake questionnaire, Pittsburg sleep quality index (PSQI), the general health questionnaire (GHQ) and a general questionnaire regarding demographic characteristics, use of drugs and history of psychopa-thology.Result:
In descriptive analysis 57.2% of subjects were defined as poor sleeper. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between sleep quality and general health status of stu-dents (r=.6, p=. 000, n= 159). Further Regression analysis showed that number of sleep disruption was a predictor for both sleep quality and psychological distressConclusion:
Sleep disruption due to shift work or other academic demanding could be a predictor for mental health morbidity in medical students which should be considered in education and mental health policy for this group of students.Keywords
Full Text
Full text is available in PDF
Copyright
© 2010, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.