Changes in sleep quality, diurnal somnolence, anxiety and depression through undergraduate medical internship

Abstract

Introduction: chronicle difficulties in sleeping, as well as its privation are associated with disorders such as depression and anxiety; these pathologies have been observed by different researches on undergraduate medical internship students, whose bad sleepers percentage oscillates between 60 and 90%.

Objective: To evaluate changes in sleep quality, diurnal somnolence, anxiety and depression among students, both at the start and at the end of an undergraduate medical internship in a public university.

Methods: It was carried out an observational, prospective and longitudinal study, throughout variable measurement in a cohort both at the start and at the end of an undergraduate medical internship. From the total amount of undergraduate physicians of 2016 July generation (N = 51), it was selected a fortuitous sample (n = 45) where these instruments were applied: Pittsburgh sleep quality index, Epworth somnolence scale, Beck inventories for anxiety and depression, McNemar statistical tests for sleep quality, as well as Wilcoxon for diurnal somnolence, anxiety and depression. The information obtained was processed by SPSS software, version 22, with a significance level of 0.05.

Results: At the end of the medical internship the bad sleep quality, diurnal somnolence and anxiety level increased, presenting statistically significant differences.
Depression degrees were negatively affected without apparent significance.

Conclusions: Both anxiety and depression showed an important increase of their prevalence by the end of the medical internship. Due to these situations, we recommend to implement periodically evaluations, prevention strategies and to assess the influence of several stressors.