Abstract
Background: Mental wellbeing is of utmost importance in the 21st century but the advent of corona virus pandemic and simultaneous lockdown has brought uncertainty, fear among other issues disturbing the normal equilibrium and leading to disharmony in mental wellbeing of university going students.
Aim: Find out prevalence and risk factors of anxiety disorder amongst undergraduate medical students of sbks medical college and research centre due to lockdown.
Methods: It was a cross sectional study. Participants were sent preformed questionnaire that included GAD-7 scale along with risk factors and socio-demographic questions via college social media groups. Students were selected by simple random sampling.
Results: Out of the 301 responses analysed, results indicated 11.63% were screened to be experiencing severe anxiety, 19.27% moderate anxiety, 29.57% mild anxiety. Disturbance in academic study schedule (r = 0.378, P < .001), inability of the participants to go outside as a routine (r = 0.234, P < .001), inability to perform extracurricular activities (r = 0.160, P = .006) and the lack of offline/On campus experience were significant factors leading to increased anxiety for the students (r=0.322, P<0.001).
Conclusions: The COVID-19 lockdown had created a significant anxiety among the medical students. Lockdown related impact on the mental wellbeing of students is on rise and interventions have to be devised to prevent further mental deteoration and treat anxiety via counselling or pharmaceutical measures.
