Stress in Undergraduate Medical Students

ABSTRACT Stress corresponds to physical, psychological and hormonal responses that occur when the body needs to adapt to a challenging situation. It is one of the most recurrent responses in the academic world due to the exhaustive routine and dense content that demand responsibility and competitiveness from the students. In medical undergraduate schools, we add to these factors the student’s concern to learn the content that was discussed in class and the pressure exerted by the students themselves, in addition to the demands of society. Given the relevance of the topic, this study aimed to evaluate the occurrence of stress during medical undergraduate school in students from a private university in the Alto Tietê region, in the state of São Paulo. Two research instruments, the Lipp Adult Stress Symptom Inventory (ISSL) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), were applied to n= 420 undergraduate students (67.14% females) attending the basic (first and second years) and vocational cycles (third to sixth years), and all participants were volunteers. According to the PSS, higher levels of stress were observed in students from the first to the third years, when compared to students from the fourth to the sixth years of medical school. The ISSL demonstrated the occurrence of stress in 65% of the students, of which 9.04% were in the “near exhaustion” phase and 0.95% in the “exhaustion” phase, which represent the highest levels of stress, with the occurrence of symptoms being more prevalent in female students. Among all the analyzed groups, students attending the first to the third years showed a higher stress index than the others, which may be associated to the distribution of curricular contents with the predominance of conceptual disciplines, as well as the process of transition from theoretical contents to practical activities. These results may be related to the students’ adaptation to the university routine, to the courses taken and to the obligations that higher education demands.