Sleep Quality and Daytime Sleepiness among Medical Undergraduate Students in Tamil Nadu: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Sleep quality is strongly related to psychological and physical well-being. Medical students experience long duration of study period, academic over load, frequent exams, fear of failure and highly demanding lifestyle. They are vulnerable to poor sleep quality. Aim: To find the prevalence of sleep quality and daytime sleepiness and their associated factors among medical undergraduate students in Tamil Nadu, India. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study conducted among 367 undergraduate medical students from first year to final year of a Government Medical College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data on socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle behavioural factors, mobile phone usage and academic performance. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and Epworth Daytime Sleepiness Scale (EDSS) were used to assess sleep quality and excessive daytime sleepiness, respectively. Descriptive statistics was used to express baseline characteristics. Chi-square test was be applied to test associated factor. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to find correlation between continuous variables. Results: Poor quality of sleep and excessive daytime sleepiness was found among 54.2% and 28.6% of students respectively. Poor sleep quality and excessive daytime sleepiness was significantly associated with increased duration of mobile phone usage (p=0.030 and p=0.009 respectively). Significant association was found between sleep quality and academic performance (p=0.004). Statistically significant correlation was found between sleep quality and duration of mobile phone usage (r=0.18, p=0.0001) as well as sleep quality and excessive daytime sleepiness (r=0.14, p=0.005). Conclusion: Prevalence of poor quality sleep and excessive daytime sleepiness was found to be high among medical students. Mobile phone overuse was significantly associated with poor sleep quality and excessive daytime sleepiness. Students with good quality of sleep had better academic performance when compared to poor sleepers. Excessive daytime sleepiness was found in increasing pattern among those with poor quality sleep.