Neurophobia among medical students in Sudan

Untitled

“…Neurological disorders constitute more than 6.4% of the health burden and 12% of mortality globally (Ridsdae, 2009;Abulaban et al, 2015) The prevalence and impact of neurological conditions place a higher demand on the healthcare system to improve on neurological care. Therefore, doctors/physicians need to be better prepared in their approach and diagnosis to this specialty (Fantaneanu et al, 2014). Given these statistics, the effect that neurophobia has on medical students will greatly affect the treatment provided to patients who complain of neurological symptoms (Nham, 2012).…”

“…Pandey and Zimitat, 2007; Sotgiu et al, 2020).The last group of contributing factors affects the medical students during their clinical training years and include the difficulty, complexity and length of the clinical examination (Nham, 2012), the lack of proper exposure to neurologically impaired patients and insufficient bedside teaching(Nham, 2012;Kam et al, 2013), the large number of rare and intricate diagnoses and, at times, the inability to have a conclusive curative treatment plan for many of the cases(Matthias et al, 2013). The second and third group of risk factors during the students' pre-clinical and clinical training years are modifiable(Fantaneanu et al, 2014) and, therefore, the development of neurophobia can be classified according to intrinsic and extrinsic factors.Intrinsic factors refer to the students and include the perception of neurology within the medical community(Nham, 2012; Tarolli and Jozefowicz, 2018), the students' perception of the complexity of neuroanatomy as a subject(Nham, 2012;Kam et al, 2013; Tarolli and Jozefowicz, 2018),theirinability to apply basic scientific knowledge to the clinical environment (Nham, 2012), and a lack of self-confidence in the approach and understanding of the elementary neurological concepts (Nham, 2012; Geoghegan et al 2019). Extrinsic factors include poor or insufficient teaching of neuroanatomy (Nham, 2012; Kam et al, 2013; Venter et al, 2022), and the limited exposure to the clinical environment and its relevance (Tarolli and Jozefowicz, 2018).…”