Quality of sleep in a sample of Egyptian medical students

Abstract

Background In the last few years, there has been a growing attention to sleep and related disorders. Numerous studies conducted within the past decade have analyzed the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation on medical students and medical staff in various specialties, but only few studies have been conducted in the Middle East. Aim of the study This study intends to explore the quality of sleep in different academic classes of medical undergraduate students of two Egyptian Universities. Subject and methods This is a cross-sectional, questionnaire based, observational study carried out during the period of April to June, 2015 among 1182 under graduate medical students enrolled at Assiut and Mansoura Universities, Egypt. The data were gathered using socio-demographic questionnaire and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and were analyzed using SPSS software. Results Mean PSQI score was 6.01 (SD=2.73), according to PSQI interpretation 46.7% of subjects had good sleep quality and 53.3% had poor sleep quality. Poor sleep quality was mostly prevalent among early years of medical education, caffeine consumers, cigarette smokers, students with fair academic achievement, those with fairly bad and very bad subjective sleep quality, sleep latency above 30minutes, sleep duration less than 7hours, fairly bad and very bad daytime functioning, those taking sleep medications, those with sleep disturbance, and sleep efficiency below 85%. Conclusion Poor sleep quality is highly prevalent in the medical students in Egypt.