Assessment of stress load among Polish and English dental students’ divisions in Poland

Introduction: Dental students are extremely stressed-out group of young people.Objectives: The aim of our study was to evaluate factors inducing most of the stress and identify students who are most susceptible to it.Material and methods: A survey was carried out during a winter exam session of 2018 for both Polish (PL) and English (ENG)-speaking students at our University.Two questionnaires were used, including dental environmental stress (DES) questionnaire and perceived stress scale (PSS-10), through which, a correlation between students' questionnaires' responses from each year and their courses of study were analyzed.Results: 309 students from PL group demonstrated a response rate (rr) of 93%, whereas in ENG group (n = 61), rr was 70%, with total rr of 89%.Adjusting for year of study and age, ENG students had lower scores than PL students in both PSS-10 (by 2.341) and DES (by 0.286).In PL group, PSS-10 scores were highest in second-year students (24.08 ± 6.44), while DES scores peaked within third-year students (1.91 ± 0.46).In ENG group, there were no statistically significant differences in PSS-10 between years, and highest DES scores were noted in fifth-year students (2.16 ± 0.28).Most stressful factor at this University was study conditions, while a group that was most susceptible to stress turned out to be second-year, third-year PL students, and fifth-year ENG students.Conclusions: The faculty should consider the results of the current study to improve the conditions for studying in order to reduce the already elevated level of stress of dental students.