Abstract
Objective: Sleep is very important for healthy, efficient and happy life of every person. Medical students, being future doctors, need to have good rest and learn to take good care of themselves if they have to serve people efficiently in future. This subject, of quality of sleep among medical students, has not been researched in India. We are doing a pilot study to find out the sleep status of medical students in a private medical college in Kerala. Design: Cross sectional study was done on medical students. Subjects: 20% of randomly selected students from five batches, a total of 100 students. Methods: Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) form was administered to the students. Data was tabulated and analysed using Microsoft Excel. Scoring was done using PSQI Microsoft Access database software. Results: Out of 100, 53 (53%) students showed poor quality sleep with Global PSQI score >5. Though only 5% felt their sleep was bad, 87% were found to have bad or worse sleep efficiency scores. Conclusions: Future doctors must follow good sleep hygiene and habits to ensure positive health, to ensure a long life full of energy. This subject needs to be studied further.
Highlights
Sleep is important for memory consolidation and learning and in order to avoid health problems and psychiatric disorders
The reduced sleep duration in medical students triggers an irregular pattern of sleep-wakefulness cycle, which is characterized by large sleep latency on weekends and by short sleep duration on weekdays
In our sample of 100 medical students, there were 69 (69%) females and 31 (31%) males and the subject were in the age range of 17 to 26
Summary
Sleep is important for memory consolidation and learning and in order to avoid health problems and psychiatric disorders. Entering medical school presents students with increased academic pressures and stress levels, and these new demands instigate changes in sleep and work habits [3]. Research shows that medical students exhibit good health behaviors compared with other young adults, they demonstrate significant changes to these habits as their education continues [4]. The reduced sleep duration in medical students triggers an irregular pattern of sleep-wakefulness cycle, which is characterized by large sleep latency on weekends and by short sleep duration on weekdays. This irregular cycle usually increases the incidence of sleep disturbances and daytime dysfunction [5]. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) is the gold standard questionnaire for assessing subjective sleep quality and has been validated in both clinical populations and non-clinical population, including college and graduate students [6,7,8]
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