Abstract

Background: There is an increasing incidence of sleep deprivation in all ages, with college students being specially affected. Medical students are even more susceptible to it, which may affect health-care system. Aims and Objectives: To study the sleep duration in medical (MBBS) students and its comparison with that of in science degree (BSc) college students.
Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional study with 215 medical and 140 BSc participants aged between 18 and 25 years. They self-reported sleep duration. Accordingly, they were categorized into <7 h per night (h) with subcategories, namely 6–7 h, 5–6 h, <5 h, and ≥7 h groups. Statistical analysis was done using ANOVA and unpaired t-test using GraphPad. P ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: Average sleep duration in medical students was 6.49 h, whereas in BSc students, it was 7.38 h. Difference in sleep duration in them was highly significant (P < 0.0001). About 52.09% of MBBS students are sleeping <7 h against 17.86% of BSc students. Sleep duration of <5 h was seen in 1.86% and 0.71% of MBBS and BSc students, respectively. Conclusion: Duration of sleep per night in medical students is significantly less than that of BSc students; more than half of the medical students are sleeping <7 h in contrast to less than one-fifth of BSc students. Approximately one-fifth of the medicos are sleeping <6 h, which is not recommended for younger adults.