Find in Library

Background: Stress is an important mental health problem which significantly affects the medical under graduates. Cortisol is known as stress hormone. Medical education is very stressful out of all higher education and medical undergraduates are more affected when compared to other professional students. In that examination has been described as a naturalistic stressor capable of affecting human health. Objectives : To estimate and correlate serum cortisol and lipid profile before & during the examination in medical students. Materials & Methods: A longitudinal follow up study was done on 50 first MBBS students(aged,18-25 years) of Prathima college after taking informed consent. Subjects were assessed for stress parameters with given questionnaire of 42 items(DASS-42) and serum cortisol ,lipid profile at two times. Exactly 5 ml of venous blood was collected from each subject before & during major examination for cortisol & lipid profile. Cortisol was assessed using ELISA techniques, while lipid parameters were assessed using standard enzymaticspectrophotometric methods. Results: There was statistically significant increase in serum cortisol, Total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol levels in students during examination stress compared to the before examination period (P = 0.001, 0.001, 0.001, 0.005 and 0.001, respectively). There was also non significant positive correlation between serum cortisol and other lipid profile parameters before examination stress but not during the examination period. Conclusion: Significant increase in cortisol, TC, HDL and LDL but no significant correlation between cortisol and the other parameters were observed during examination stress. This study could be helpful to the students in planning strategies to be adopted to cope up the examination stress to prevent harzards of stress