Cross sectional study of depression, anxiety and stress due to COVID-19 pandemic among undergraduate medical students from Maharashtra

Abstract

Background: The ongoing pandemic due to novel corona virus has caused global social and economic disruption, including the largest global recession since the great depression. Pandemic has led to essential supply shortage like daily needs medicine that led to haphazard among population. Worldwide increase in case numbers have increases anxiety among population and also increase the tremendous stress among students due to lack of educational activity. This affects psychology of students to move away from studies. Due to pandemic many students were unable to attend clinics that create anxiousness among them which led to anxiety and stress.Methods: The survey was conducted among the undergraduate medical students across the state of Maharashtra. The online semi-structured questionnaire was developed with the aid of Google form, among various undergraduate medical students by using DASS-21 scale.Results: In the present study, total 435 students responded and returned completely filled in questionnaire. Out of these 435 study participants, 213 (48.97%) were male students and remaining 222 (51.03%) were female students. Based on responses to the DASS-21 scale, study participants can be categorized as normal or with mild, moderate, severe and extremely severe depression, anxiety or stress.Conclusions: The present study concludes that psychological health of the undergraduate medical students who participated for the survey is involved to a sizeable extent. Depression and anxiety and some or other degree of stress was detected in the participants as a common finding.

Prevalence of Depression Among Undergraduate Medical Students in India: A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Table 1 shows the study characteristics of the included studies comprising study population, study setting, study tool, study period, sample size and number of depressed undergraduate students along with ROB [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…The prevalence of depression in the nineteen studies ranged from 16.0% to 100.0%. The pooled prevalence of nineteen studies, [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] 50.0% (95% CI: 31.0 to 70.0), was shown in Figure 2.…”

“…Minimal depression was seen in only four studies, [20,24,28,31] with a pooled prevalence of 28.0% (95% CI: 20.0 to 37.0) whereas mild depression was found in six studies, [24,[27][28][29][30]34] with pooled prevalence of 14.0% (95% CI: 4.0 to 28.0). The pooled prevalence of thirteen studies that have found moderate depression was found to be 15.0% (95% CI: 11.0 to 19.0) [20,21,24,25,[27][28][29][30][31][33][34][35]37]. The pooled prevalence of three studies that have found moderately severe depression was found to be 7.0% (95% CI: 3.0 to 12.0) [20,24,31].…”

“…Severe depression was seen in eleven studies [21,24,25,[27][28][29]31,[33][34][35]37] with a pooled prevalence of 5.0% (95% CI: 3.0 to 7.0), and extremely severe depression was found in five studies [21,25,34,35,37] with a pooled prevalence of 5.0% (95% CI: 2.0 to 11.0). Seven studies have seen the depression of undergraduate medical students among males and females.…”

“…The nineteen included studies were analyzed for heterogeneity and publication bias [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. High heterogeneity was found in the analysis with the Q test (p <0.001) and I 2 statistics (I 2 = 99.6%).…”