Assessment of sleep quality and quantity and its association with stress levels among medical students during clinical years

Background:
Sleep is important for normal body functioning of human beings. Sleep
quality and quantity have important effects on the mental health of medical students. Poor sleep quantity and quality produces tiredness, anxiety, difficulty in concentration and memorizing things. Those students who are under academic pressure, lack physical activity and have poor sleep quality and quantity tend to be more anxious and aggressive.
Objective:
To assess the quality and quantity of sleep among the medical students
during their clinical years.  To associate stress with sleep quality and quantity of medical students in their clinical years.
Methods:
This is a cross sectional study. Data was collected from 385 medical students of clinical years of one public medical college (KMC) and one private medical college (NWSM) in Peshawar. Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI) was used for assessing the sleep quality and Perceived stress scale (PSS) was used for assessing the stress levels of respondents.

Results:
Amongst 385 medical students, 54.5% of the participants had moderate
sleep difficulty and 74.29% of the participants were moderately stressed
(p<0.05). In comparison, female medical students had poor mental health
status (16.9% of females were highly stressed, 8.7% of males where highly
stressed, p<0.05) and sleep quality (3.7% of females, 2.0% of males had
severe sleep difficulty p<0.05.The college setting showed no significant
association between sleep quality (p value: 0.451) and perceived stress (p
value: 0.843)
Conclusion:
In this study, we found out that medical students in clinical years are
suffering from lack of both proper sleep quality and quantity, which is
reflected by the moderate to high levels of stress among majority of the
participants of this study. An alarmingly high number of students are
chronically stressed which reciprocally affects their poor sleep quality.
Keywords: Sleep quality, sleep quantity, perceived stress levels, medical
students, private medical colleges, public medical colleges