Lifestyle among college students: a challenge for future health professionals

ABSTRACT Introduction: Health science students play a crucial role in educating the public about the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle. Nevertheless, the transformations brought about by university life can pose a challenge in maintaining healthy habits. Therefore, it becomes imperative to understand the lifestyle of university students to assess the care for their own health and academic development. Objective: This work aims to comprehensively analyze the Lifestyle and associated factors among health science students. Method: This is a cross-sectional, analytical and quantitative study, with a sample of 618 students from a public university in Brazil. The FANTASTIC Lifestyle instrument was used to analyze Lifestyle. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) and anxiety and stress symptoms were assessed by the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). Sociodemographic data and suicidal ideation, among others, were also evaluated. Descriptive data analysis was performed, as well as Poisson Regression for crude and adjusted analysis. Lifestyle was considered the dependent variable and its inadequate level the analysis category. Results: There was a prevalence of inadequate lifestyle among a quarter of university students. In the multivariate model, there was a significant positive correlation between the prevalence of inadequate lifestyle and the variables depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, dissatisfaction with body image and overweight; and a negative correlation with well-being was observed. Conclusion: These findings allowed us to identify that health behaviors are interrelated with the physical, psychological and social dimensions of the assessed individuals.