Abstract

GONZALEZ-OLAYA, Hilda L.; DELGADO-RICO, Hernán D.; ESCOBAR-SANCHEZ, Mauricio  and  CARDENAS-ANGELONE, María Eugenia. Association among stress, depression risk and academic performance in students from the first semesters in a Colombian medical school. FEM (Ed. impresa) [online]. 2014, vol.17, n.1, pp.47-54. ISSN 2014-9840.  https://dx.doi.org/10.4321/S2014-98322014000100008.

Introduction: Medical students have to deal with multiple factors that can affect their mental health and academic performance, especially in the first years of the medical program. Aim: To describe the behavior of the stress response and the presence of depression symptoms of clinical importance in medical students at the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, throughout an academic semester; and their association with academic performance. Subjects and methods: A prospective cohort study. Students from the first and fourth semesters were characterized sociodemographically and they answered two psychological tests (Zung self-rating depression scale and the Perceived Stress Scale) both, at the beginning and at the end of each semester. A descriptive analysis was performed, scales results at the two time points were correlated, between them, and also with academic performance, at the end of the academic semester. Student's t, linear regression analysis, univariate and multivariate analysis were used with Stata 11 software. Results: 216 students participated in this study, with an average age of 18.4 years. Most of them came from Bucaramanga Metropolitan area. There were no statistical significant differences between the two semester's results, but there was a significant correlation between scales results and academic performance (p < 0.05). Conclusion: There is a high frequency of clinically significant depressive symptoms and self-perception of stress in medical students, being higher in women, and these results are related with students' academic performance.

Keywords : Academic performance; Depression; Medical students; Stress.

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