Background: Stress is an important mental health problem
which significantly affects the medical under graduates. Cortisol
is known as stress hormone. Medical education is very stressful
out of all higher education and medical undergraduates are
more affected when compared to other professional students.
In that examination has been described as a naturalistic stressor
capable of affecting human health.
Objectives : To estimate and correlate serum cortisol and lipid
profile before & during the examination in medical students.
Materials & Methods: A longitudinal follow up study was done
on 50 first MBBS students(aged,18-25 years) of Prathima
college after taking informed consent. Subjects were assessed
for stress parameters with given questionnaire of 42
items(DASS-42) and serum cortisol ,lipid profile at two times.
Exactly 5 ml of venous blood was collected from each subject
before & during major examination for cortisol & lipid profile.
Cortisol was assessed using ELISA techniques, while lipid
parameters were assessed using standard enzymaticspectrophotometric methods.
Results: There was statistically significant increase in serum
cortisol, Total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol
levels in students during examination stress compared to the
before examination period (P = 0.001, 0.001, 0.001, 0.005 and
0.001, respectively). There was also non significant positive
correlation between serum cortisol and other lipid profile
parameters before examination stress but not during the
examination period.
Conclusion: Significant increase in cortisol, TC, HDL and LDL
but no significant correlation between cortisol and the other
parameters were observed during examination stress. This
study could be helpful to the students in planning strategies
to be adopted to cope up the examination stress to prevent
harzards of stress..
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