Study On Drinking Behavior And Its Influencing Factors Among Undergraduates In A Medical University

BackgroundsThe risk of excessive drinking have become one of the major public health problems. There are a lot of accidents due to drinking every year. According to statistics, the number of drinkers has been rising with the tendency of younger people in recent years. Excessive drinking will not only harm his family and the society, but also bring indispensable public health problems due to various diseases caused by it. For medical students, who will become medical workers in future, the harms caused by drinking are especially serious. This study investigated and analyzed the influencing factors of excessive drinking for medical students.Objectives(1) To investigate the prevalence of alcohol drinking among medical college students in Shandong Province. (2) To explore the influencing factors of alcohol drinking for students in medical college. (3) To provide scientific data and suggestions for the training of healthy drinking in medical college.MethodsMulti stage sampling method was used in this study. The study population was the undergraduate students of a medical college in Shandong province. The self-designed questionnaire was used to investigate the general demographic characteristics, economic level, health status, information of negative life event, and drinking behavior of these students without name information. After collecting the questionnaire, SPSS 18 was used for data analysis, and multivariate logistic regression model was used to explore the influencing factors.ResultsA total of 2198 valid questionnaires were collected in this study. The students who are investigated comes from different departments, such as clinical medicine, basic medicine, nursing, pharmacy, preventive medicine, traditional Chinese medicine. The students range from freshmen to seniors with minimum age 17 and maximum age 25. The mean value of age and standard deviation is 20.25±1.23.681 among 2198 students are drinkers, and the drinking rate was about 31%. From the gender perspective, the results are as following:387 among 689 male students are drinkers, and the percentage is 56.2%; 294 among 1509 female students are drinkers, and the percentage is 19.5%. The difference is statistically significant (P< 0.05). From freshmen to seniors, the drinking rates are 24%,28.3%,30.2%, 30.5%,38.3% and 53.7% respectively. The results showed that the more senior, the higher drinking rate for these students. The difference is statistically significant (P< 0.05).We found that gender (P=0.000), the monthly cost (P=0.000,0.002,0.001), healthy self-raking (P=0.013,0.030), malaise in last two weeks(P=0.013) are statistically significant factors to drinking behavior by multivariate Logistic regression analysis.ConclusionsThe drinking behavior in medical college students is relatively common, but the drinking rate is lower than the national average. The male students have a higher drinking rate than female students. The more senior of these student, the higher drinking rate. The drinking behavior of medical students is closely related to the factors such as family situation, health condition, social environment. Many diseases due to excessive drinking damage the health of these college students. Some students have a delay in their studies, even accidents due to drinking. Drinking will not only damage these students and their families, but also the school and society. Therefore, we should pay more attention to the intervention of alcohol drinking in college, and provide some training about healthy drinking in order to make these students avoid the harm due to drinking.