Stress Among Dental Students And Its Association With Substance Abuse– A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Dental education is supposed as an extremely challenging and enormously stressful experience globally. This resultant stress can lead to depression, anxiety, absenteeism, diminished work efficiency, sleep problems, lower academic performances, and burnout. Moreover, it has also been interrelated with drug addiction and substance abuse.The present study was conducted to find out the association of Stress with Substance Abuse among Dental Students in Ghaziabad, India. Methodology:This is a descriptive Cross-sectional study conducted among 275 dental students. Dental Environmental Stress (DES) questionnaire was used to gather the data regarding stress. The assembled data was exposed to frequency distribution analysis using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software (SPSS) 21.0v. Association of Level of Stress with Substance Abuse among Dental Students was assessed using Chi-square analysis with ap value ≤0.05 considered statistically significant. Results:The response rate of this study was 91.2%. Out of the 251 study participants, 65.3% were females and 34.7% were males. The mean age of the study subjects was 24.20 ± 3.688. According to the level of stress, there were 18.7% highly stressed students among which 46.8% were having smoking habit and 14.9% consumed alcohol regularly. Association of level of stress with smoking was found to be statistically significant (p≤0.05) whereas its association with alcohol consumption was not statistically significant. Conclusion: In the present study, there is a high prevalence of stress among the dental students and most of the highly stressed students were having habit of smoking. So, it can be concluded that stress have a significant association with smoking but its association with alcohol is uncertain. Keywords:Alcohol drinking,Dental students, Psychological Stress, Smoking, Substance-related disorders.