Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) represents an increasing public health problem worldwide. Measuring CAD risk factors among young adults will be helpful in reduction and control of their future risk to CAD also and other cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Objective: To identify the pattern of CAD risk factors among Al-Azhar University medical students (males and females) of all educational grades.
Methodology: Acomparative cross sectional study was conducted on 1142 (755 and 387) medical students at the Faculty of Medicine- Boys and Girls respectively-Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire, anthropometric and blood pressure measurements were taken. Also, biochemical investigations for blood glucose and lipid profile were conducted on a subsample of 24% from total sample. SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis.
Results: The mean age of participants was 21.17±1.78 with males constituting two thirds of the sample. The majority of participants had at least one risk factor to CAD. The most prevalent risk factor of CAD was insomnia (73.5%) followed by consumption of carbonated beverages (62.3%) and fatty meat (46.4%). Also, stress (46.6%), overweight/or obesity (34.2%), physical inactivity (34%) and hypertension (19.5%) were predominant risk factors. Whereas, smoking prevalence was low (7.1%). Dyslipidemia was detected among 23% of the studied subsample.
Conclusion: CAD risk factors were highly prevalent among medical students. However, smoking was present only among males and with a low prevalence. Initiation of health educational programs to raise awareness about CAD risk factors and periodic screening programs to detect CAD risk factors are recommended.