Prevalence of Stress Levels Among First Year Medical Undergraduate Students.

ABSTRACT

Medicine is one of the most sought after careers. Students with outstanding marks gain entry into medical colleges. High level of competition, parental pressure, excess workload and new environment put the medical trainees under constant stress. This study was thus undertaken to assess the levels of stress among first year medical students. Very few studies are available that assess the stress levels at such an early stage in the medical career. The stress levels were assessed using the Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), which is an internationally validated ten item questionnaire. All the 250 first year medical students of the government medical college in Bangalore answered the questionnaire along with demographic details. They were in the age group of 17-20years and the mean Perceived Stress score was 20.29 (SD = 6.24). The scores were arbitrarily divided, and it was found that 37 students (14.8%) had Low Perceived Stress, 171 students (68.4%) had Moderate Perceived Stress and 42 students (16.8%) had High Perceived Stress. With such high stress levels, we can see the urgent need to conduct more studies to further identify the causes of stress and help students take appropriate steps to combat stress.