Prevalence of anxiety among medical students of D.G. Khan Medical College: A cross-sectional study.

Objective: To evaluate anxiety levels among medical students of a public medical college by using a self-administered anxiety questionnaire. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Study was conducted on the MBBS students of D.G. Khan Medical College. Period: December 2022 to June 2023. Methods: A validated questionnaire comprised on Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) scale was provided to all MBBS students at D. G. Khan medical college. Sociodemographic variables like; gender, age, locality, and current residential status were included in the questionnaire. The data was transferred to SPSS V-23 to analyze the variance of Anxiety Levels and MBBS study years among both genders. The p-value (p ≤ 0.05) was used to decide significance of the results. Results: The number of respondents was 523 (93.6%) out of 559 enrolled students at the time of the survey. Using the BAI scale, the overall anxiety estimated in MBBS students was 96.4% including male (95.5%) and female (97.0%). However, the prevalence of severe anxiety observed in female (22.2%) students was slightly higher than male (21.9%) students. Moreover, the highest level of severe anxiety (37.1%) was detected in 3rd year students whereas, the peak value of overall anxiety (23.1%) was detected in 2nd year students. The gender comparison test (p = 0.006) revealed that females exhibit more anxiety than males. Conclusion: The higher levels of anxiety were consistently observed among female students. The severe anxiety was observed among 3rd year students, likely due to their transition into the clinical year facing additional c hallenges beyond academics.