Abstract:

Background: Health students’ sleeping pattern is characterized by insufficient sleep duration, delayed sleep onset and occurrence of a napping episodes during a day according to the study done in Hong Kong 2009. It seems that the prevalence of sleeping disorders is higher in health student than in non-health student and general population.

Methodology: This was a cross sectional study that conducted at Catholic University of Health and Allied Science (CUHAS) in Mwanza City. Three hundred thirty three medical students such as diploma students, undergraduate and postgraduate including in the study. Social – demographic data and other information obtained by using a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire.

Results: Among all the participants 204 (68.0%) bad no insomnia, 26 (8.8%) had below the threshold insomnia, 61 (20.2%) had moderate clinical insomnia and 9 (2.9%) had severe clinical insomnia according to ISI score and about 68% with insomnia were females. On the other hand, 40 out of 333 students (13.3%) had excessive sleepiness and factors that were found to be associated with sleep disorders includes, students’ school, gender, marital status, alcohol use caffeine or coffee use and employment status of the medical students.

Conclusion: In this study about 23.1% and 13.3% of the participants had clinical insomnia and excessive sleepiness respectively. The leading risks seemed to be associated with sleep disorders were alcohol use, student’s school (MD), night on call duties and gender. Therefore sleep disorders can decrease their quality of life and academic performances among medical students, so proper counselling and support should be provided to this subgroup of population as they are more prone to suffer from sleep disorders.

Keywords: Sleep disorders and medical students.