Sleep Disruption and its Correlation to Psychological Distress among Medical Students.

Medical students are a population who are at great risk to develop sleep disruption 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. We performed a cross-sectional study to identify the sleep quality and its correlation 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 psychopathology. 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 students (r=.6, p=. 000, n= 159). Further Regression analysis showed that number of sleep disruption was a predictor for both sleep quality and psychological distress. 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.