European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine

Background: Lack of physical activity (PA) was one of the most important cardiovascular risk factors causing higher morbidity and mortality rate worldwide. Thus, early health promotion activity like physical activity is needed for healthy life. As future physicians the health of the medical students is even more important as they personally ignore adopting healthy lifestyle. So, the study was conducted with an aim to estimate the level of physical activity and to find the factors associated with low physical activity among medical students. Methodology: An institute based cross-sectional study was conducted among 200 medical students in a medical college in Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh. Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (GPAQ) by WHO was used to estimate the level of physical activity and Metabolic Equivalents (METs) were used to express the intensity of physical activities. The collected data was entered into Microsoft excel and analysed using SPSS version 21. Results: The mean age of the study population was 19.61 ± 1.94 years and 62% of the study subjects were female. Based on WHO recommendation of minimum 600 MET min/week in the present study 64.5% had adequate physical activity and 35.5% had low physical activity. Low physical activity was high in female students when compared to male students (41.1% vs 26.3%, p-value=0.034). There was low level of physical activity in first professional year (46%) when compared to other professional years. Conclusion: There was need of promoting physical activity among medical students. Medical colleges need to increase the proportion of students adopting and maintaining regular physical activity habits