Violence Attitude and Its Relation to Health-Related Habits in Medical Students’ at Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University.

Background: Youth violence is a global public health problem. It includes a range of acts from bullying and physical fighting, to more severe sexual and physical assault to homicide. Worldwide an estimated 200 000 homicides occur among youth 10–29 years of age each year, making it the fourth leading cause of death for people in this age group. Youth homicide rates vary dramatically between and within countries, being more common in developing countries than more developed ones. Researchers and prevention specialists are trying to identify the factors that increase young people attitude toward violence in order to plan for successful interventions and to design more effective prevention programs. Objectives: to measure medical students’ attitude toward violence at Ain Shams university hospital and to find out the relations between medical students’ scores on the attitudes toward violence, demographic variables, and health-related habits. Methods: A Descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out at Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University; 1257 Medical Students were included in the study. Data was collected using a structured interviewed questionnaire adopted from National centre for injury prevention and control of the centre for disease control and prevention. Results: The total attitude score toward violence was 53.02 ± 11.74, (48.0%) of the studied medical students show moderate attitude toward violence. There was a highly statistically significant relationship between violence attitude level and Smoking status, Taking Anxiolytics, Analgesics and Alcohol. Ordinal logistic regression analysis shows that Students’ gender, grade, smoking status and analgesic intake are independent predictors of total attitude score toward violence (P<0.05). Conclusion: An increase in attitude score towards violence among medical students is well observed. Male gender, older student ages, smoking and analgesics intake are important influencing factors that require special attention while designing intervention programs aiming at reducing violence rates among youth.