Stress and Coping Styles are Associated with Severe Fatigue in Medical Students

Abstract

Fatigue is a common complaint among medical students and researchers consider it to be related to poor academic outcomes. The authors' goal in the present study was to determine whether stress and coping strategies were associated with fatigue in medical students. The study group consisted of 73 second-year healthy students attending the Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine. Participants completed a questionnaire about fatigue (Japanese version of Chalder Fatigue Scale), stress, stress coping (Japanese version of the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations), overwork, and nocturnal sleeping hours. On univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses adjusted for age and gender, stress was positively associated with fatigue. In addition, after adjustment for age, gender, and emotion- and task-oriented stress coping activities, avoidance-oriented stress coping activity was associated with fatigue. The results suggest that stress and the coping style are correlated with fatigue in medical students.

Index Terms:

• coping
• fatigue
• medical students
• overwork
• stress

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the 21st Century COE program Base to Overcome Fatigue from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the Japan Science and Technology Corporation/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society, the Japanese Government. The authors thank Dr. Luba Wolchuk for editorial assistance.

Dr Tanaka is with the Departments of Physiology and of Biomarker and Molecular Biophysics at Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan as well as with the 21st Century COE Program Base to Overcome Fatigue (from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese Government). Dr Fukuda and Dr Mizuno are with the Department of Physiology at Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan as well as with the Japan Science and Technology Corporation/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society. Dr Kuratsune is with the 21st Century COE Program Base to Overcome Fatigue as well as with the Department of Health Science, Faculty of Health Science for Welfare, at Kansai University of Welfare Sciences in Japan. Dr Watanabe is with the Department of Physiology at Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, the 21st Century COE Program Base to Overcome Fatigue, the Japan Science and Technology Corporation/Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society, and the RIKEN Center for Molecular Imaging Science in Japan.

Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications