The relationship between body mass index (BMI) and stress score among pharmacy students in UiTM Puncak Alam campus / Sharifah Nafisha Tuan Syed Mulki

Purpose: Stress is unavoidable and it is not possible to be eliminated from our lives entirely. However, stress is not caused by the same factor for everybody, nor does everyone experience stress in the same way. Therefore different individual will react differently towards the stressor that they may experience. In order to overcome the stress, people may tend to do actions that can results in change of sleep pattern, eating style, social life and also financial. As students, there are many factors that cause the stress to occur, thus this study tries to investigate what are the main stressors to the stress. Besides, the purpose of this study is to know whether there is relationship between BMI and stress score among Pharmacy students. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted to 300 undergraduate Pharmacy students of UiTM Puncak Alam Campus and they were selected using the random stratified sampling method. Data about the stress score were collected using a specific questionnaire for students while data about BMI were calculated using the height and weight of the respondents. Results: A total of 256 (85.33%) valid questionnaires were collected. There was a high prevalence of stress among the Pharmacy students and the main factors were due to academic workload and tests/exams. Apart from that, the results stated that there were no significant difference between dependent and independent variables as p-values are more than 0.05 except for stress score with year of study. Conclusion: This study showed that most of the students have a normal body weight while the stress score is highest in third year. There was no significant relationship between BMI and stress score.