Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction

Over the past decades, the prevalence of overweight, especially obesity, has steadily increased. This global scourge has affected all populations including that of medical students. The objective of our work was to determine the prevalence of this pathology in the population of future physicians and to study the factors associated with it.

Methods

This is a cross-sectional study including 120 medical students, recruited at the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis between November 2019 and March 2020.

Results

The average age of the students was 21.82 ± 2.09 years old. A female predominance was noted witha sex ratio (M/F) = 0.54. The average BMI was 21.4 kg/m² with extremes ranging from 16.87 to 35.67 kg/m². Overweight (BMI> or equal to 25 kg/m²) was present in 30% of the cases of which 30 were pre-obese, 5 had class I obesity and only 1 student had class II obesity. The mean waist circumference was 79.73 ± 10.74 cm and abdominal obesity was noted in 36 students (30%). This excess weight was significantly associated with the female sex (P = 0.002). It was also significantly associated with college year repetition, noted in 36 students (P = 0.018) and was unrelated to the year of medical study. This overweight was significantly more noted in smokers (n = 36) (P = 0.049) and regular alcohol users (n = 37) (P <0.001). It was more common in students who used drugs without this being significant (P = 0.59). We did not find a significant association between the use of anxiolytics and antidepressant medication and overweight. The mean of the perceived stress scale (PSS) was higher in the presence of overweight (31.61 ± 5.85 versus 29.99 ± 5.61) without this being significant.

Conclusion

Overweight was common in our student population. Identification of potentially associated factors is necessary in order to reduce the prevalence of this pathology, a source of both physical and psychological disability.