Academic stress in Health Sciences university students and its influence on academic performance

Introduction: The discomfort that Health Sciences students present due to physical or emotional factors called stressors, exert a significant pressure affecting their average grades obtained in an academic period. Objectives: Characterize academic stress, its triggering factors, the influence on the academic performance of university students of Health Sciences, and coping strategies for the management of the teaching and learning process.Methods: Bibliographic review, from 2020 to 2024. The sources consulted were LILACS Regional, Scielo regional, PLOS, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Web of Science Latin America. We considered 34/57 scientific articles found in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Systematic reviews with less than 10 articles in their analysis, duplicity, plagiarism, and paid articles were excluded. Discussion: Academic stress significantly affected students, causing emotional, behavioral, and physiological problems due to task overload and demanding evaluations. Studies revealed common symptoms such as physical pain, sadness, anxiety, with high impact in Health Sciences areas. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues, highlighting the need for effective coping strategies such as physical activity to improve well-being and academic performance. Conclusions: Academic stress is a multicausal and multidimensional individual adaptive response process studied by university students of Health Sciences. Academic stressors, risk factors and protective factors, will allow guiding confrontation strategies and the creation of a protocol for academic management as part of the teaching-learning process, for its mitigation.