Exploring the association between mental health and subjective sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic among Bangladeshi university students

Abstract

The outbreak of new coronavirus disease has triggered a global panic, affecting the mental well-being of people of all ages, including students. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between selfreported mental health concerns and subjective sleep quality of the Bangladeshi university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. A web-based cross-sectional study was conducted to maintain the social distancing recommended by the World Health Organization. There were 1,317 student responses from 49 universities across Bangladesh. Data was analyzed by executing both bi-variate and multivariate analysis. Findings indicate that 27.1%, 51.0%, 45.9%, and 86.0% of students had poor subjective sleep quality, anxiety, depression, and fear of COVID-19, respectively. Anxiety (AOR ¼ 1.09, 95% CI: 1.06-1.12, p < 0.001) was a risk factor for increasing the poor subjective sleep quality of university students. In contrast, the odds of poor subjective sleep quality were lower with increasing the score of depression (AOR ¼ 0.88, 95% CI: 0.86-0.90, p < 0.001) and fear of COVID-19 (AOR ¼ 0.97, 95% CI: 0.94-0.99, p < 0.05). Compared to public university students, private university students were more likely to report poor subjective sleep quality since the pandemic began. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that psychiatric conditions of university students should be monitored during the COVID-19 epidemic, and necessary strategies, such as allocation of resources, implementation of awareness programs, establishment of psychological counselling unit, should carefully be devised.

The Prevalence of Psychological Distress and Its Relationship to Sleep Quality in Saudi Arabia's General Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Findings indicate that 36.6% of students had poor sleep quality, while 40.5% experienced psychological distress. Comparable with our results, a recent study in Bangladesh reported that University students were mentally distressed and experiencing poor subjective sleep quality during the pandemic (58). Similar results were also revealed by Martinez-Lezaun et al (59), who reported 70.7% of the University students showed worse sleep quality during the lockdown.…”

The Relationship Between Fear of COVID-19 and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress

“…This may lead to differences in fear of COVID-19 levels of different cultures (allocentric vs. egocentric). Overall, the average age of the sample, female proportion, and culture were considered moderators in the study as these variables were treated as moderators in individual studies (e.g., Ahammed et al, 2021; Kassim et al, 2021; Midorikawa et al, 2021; Siddique et al, 2021; Tsipropoulou et al, 2020).…”

Investigating Poor Sleep Quality and Associated Factors During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Population-Based Survey in Bangladesh

“…Consequently, this study aimed to investigate the prevalence of poor sleep quality by using the PSQI and its associated factors among Bangladeshi people during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, some studies on sleep disturbance, subjective sleep quality, and insomnia have recently been published, conducted with different groups in Bangladesh (45)(46)(47)(48). Though one of these studies assessed the sleep quality by using the PSQI among Bangladeshi general people with limited samples, it did not investigate any COVID-19 pandemicrelated factors and their relations with poor sleep quality (48).…”