Abstract
Background: Cadaver dissection is compulsory to first-year medical students in Pakistan. It is an effective educational process but it also subjects the students to a great level of stress and mental pressure. This experiment was aimed at quantifying the number of students experiencing this stress and seeking variables to anticipate it, particularly gender variation, between girls and boys.
Methodology: We conducted an intended research at Ayub Medical College in a period of six months. We sampled 151 first-year medical students. 93.2% of the sampled students participated, including 54.3 percent girls and 45.7 percent boys. We employed two generalized questionnaires, Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21) and Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R). The multivariate logistic regression statistical technique was used to identify the factors that were most closely associated with serious distress.
Findings: Approximately, 43.0% of the students were clinically severely psychologically in distress (confidence interval: 35.2-51.0). In girls it was more (52.4%) than in boys (31.9%) and this was statistically significant (p < 0.001). The mean scores on DASS-21 were mild-to-moderate and the overall mean score of girls was higher than that of boys in all subscales. As an example, on the anxiety, girls had 13.1 (SD.7) and boys had 9.2 (SD.5) which was significant (p.001). A quarter (23.2) of the students reported post-traumatic stress symptoms that were at or exceeded the clinical cutoff with the IES-R.
Data Analysis (Predictors): The logistic regression model identified nine independent predictors of distress among which a good overall predictive accuracy was noted (Area Under ROC Curve= 0.839). The most significant predictors included a severe initial reaction to dissection (Adjusted Odds Ratio= 3.21) and previous exposure to trauma (Adjusted Odds Ratio= 2.95). Gender was also a major predictor: it made them more likely to be in distress by a factor of 2.51 (Adjusted Odds Ratio).
Findings: Cadaver dissection has a significant psychological stressor among first-year medical students, particularly in girls. The risk factors that we identified are indicative of particular actions that might assist, including improved psychological readiness to dissection, powerful encouragement of faculty, and mental-health intercessions that take into account gender disparities in anatomy teaching.