Prevalence, predictors and perception of loneliness among medical undergraduates

Background

Transition from high school to a medical school can be a challenging period for students.Life in a medical school can be very demanding with high academic pressures along with the risk of getting isolated in the new environment. As loneliness can lead to psychiatric ailments and physical disorders,identifying and addressing the problem among medical students is the need of the hour. The authors aim was to find out the prevalence of loneliness and its various predictors among medical undergraduates.

Methods

This cross-sectional study was conducted among 500 medical undergraduates in a private university in Maharashtra. Prevalence of loneliness was assessed using 11 item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness scale. A structured questionnaire was used to find out the demographic and social variables, health and study variables.

Results

Among the 500 medical undergraduates, 450 students willingly participated. After excluding 30 students who were part of the pilot study, a total of 407 responses were taken for analysis and the rest not considered due to missing data. Sixty one percent of participants reported feeling moderately lonely, and 23.6 % reported feeling severely lonely. Having financial insecurities (p = 0.030),being a female student(p = 0.01), struggling childhood experience (p = 0.003) being an introvert (p = 0.006) with low self-esteem (p = 0.005) and language barrier (p = 0.009) less physical activity (p = 0.004) more social anxiety (p = 0.00) were all associated with loneliness in our study. More number of female participants perceived loneliness as a problem when compared to males (p = 0.004).

Conclusion

Prevalence of loneliness is very high among medical undergraduates. They are more vulnerable, so various remedial measures to help reduce loneliness among them need to be addressed.