Sleep Pattern of Undergraduate Medical Students of the selected Medical Colleges in Dhaka during COVID-19 Pandemic: An Online Survey

Abstract

Background: Maintaining a regular sleep pattern helps to preserve the timing of the body's internal clock and can aid in having a healthy lifestyle. Medical students are a general population sub-group that is more vulnerable to poor sleep quality. Method: A online based cross sectional study conducted to find out the sleep pattern of 264 undergraduate medical students during COVID-19 pandemic situation by using a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire with Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) sacle. Results: Medical students spent up to 9 hours in digital media (mean 5.1±2.7 hours) per day. Maximum students had gone to bed within 10.01pm-12am but woke up later while 40.2% of students had severe sleep latency and 32.3% students missed their breakfast due to sleep. Mean sleep duration at night was 6.5±1.3 hours but 64.4% of them had poor sleep quality. There 18.9% students had very low habitual sleep efficiency, 28.4% took daytime nap ≥60 minutes regularly, 68.9% students faced daytime dysfunction. Statistically significant associations was found between BMI, physical exercise, smoking, tea/coffee consumption, taking drugs for stress/recreation, wake-up time and different sleep related variables like sleep duration, sleep latency, sleep efficiency, sleep quality (p < 0.05). Conclusion:These results demonstrate that, insufficient sleep and unsatisfactory sleep-wake pattern have been documented among medical students.