Promoting healthy lifestyles to the cohort of medical students is one of the pressing challenges facing today’s educational and medical institutions. The relevance of research in this direction is due to the lack of study on this issue, in particular, the impact of physical activity, sleep duration, and other factors on the quality of life of medical students.

OBJECTIVE

To study the effect of medical students’ lifestyle on their quality of life during their studies.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

A two-stage questionnaire survey (Stage 1 — 1.060 respondents, Stage 2 — 1.104 respondents) of medical students was conducted. The sociological method, variance analysis, and logical analysis were used.

RESULTS

Medical students described their physical activity. Thus, 59.5±1.5% of respondents spent 30 minutes or more daily walking at a moderate or fast pace, and 40.5±1.5% spent less than 30 minutes daily. Assessing how healthy the physical environment (conditions for physical activity) is, only 7.9±0.7% of medical students marked the physical environment as «quite healthy.» It was noted that the formation of a healthy physical environment could have a favorable effect on the overall health assessment (p<0.001). In addition, medical students show an increase in the level of dissatisfaction with the quality of life mainly in the 2nd and 3rd year, followed by graduation, i.e., in the 4th year, quality of life scores relatively improve (p=0.025). In our study, we discuss and present in more detail the results of questionnaires on «nutrition,» «physical activity,» «smoking,» «alcohol consumption,» and «health and disease» to determine the prevalence of risk factors as well as «quality of life assessment» in the medical students.

CONCLUSION

Phased correction of lifestyle and physical activity of medical students can improve their subjective health, optimize the learning process and training quality for the future medical profession, as well as create the image of healthy health care professional.