CO-RELATION BETWEEN THYROID FUNCTION AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF B.SC. NURSING STUDENTS IN A SELECTED COLLEGE IN BANGALORE.

Abstract Introduction: India has the distinction of producing maximum number of nurses in the health care setting. Students pursuing Nursing education come with varying abilities from diverse background, undergo rigorous and strenuous training of 4 years before becoming a fully fledged graduate Nurse. Nursing colleges witness a varying degree of performance of these students in general and in academics in particular. Decline in student’s performance can be attributed to various factors. It is seldom understood that the physical and health issues are probed as contributors to poor academic performance. Fluctuations in the level of thyroid hormone are known to affect cognitive function along with somatic manifestations such as lethargy, fatigue, breathlessness, sleeplessness/excessive sleep which can adversely affect their interest in studies. Thus the investigators decided to correlate between thyroid function and academic performance of B.Sc Nursing students at St. John’s college of Nursing. Methodology: The research design selected for this study was descriptive cross sectional design. The setting was St.John’s College of Nursing.103 students were selected using purposive sampling technique. The academic performance of the students were arbitrarily classified into above average (>60% Above 420 marks), average (50-60 % 350-420) & below average (< 50 % Below 350 marks). The total marks was 700.The thyroid status was classified into Hyperthyroid, Euthyroid & Hypothyroid based on the normal values. Normal values as per St. John’s medical college hospital were noted as reference. Results: 81.6% of the students were euthyroid 8.7% and 9.7% of students had hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism respectively. Of the 103 subjects, majority (68.9%) were above average in the academic performance, while 7.8% average and 23.8% were below average. A weak negative correlation (‘r’ value -0.062) was found between TSH and Academic performance of students and between T3 and academic performance (‘r’ value was -0.193).This was not statistically significant at 0.05 level of significance. An attempt was made to draw an association between the 3 categories of thyroid status (Hypo, Hyper and Euthyroid ) with the academic performance (Above average, Average and below average).The findings revealed that there was no association between the two variables with a chi-square value of 1.302 which was not statistically significant at 0.05 level of significance. Conclusion: The study revealed that there is no correlation between the thyroid function and academic performance of BSc Nursing students as there was only a weak negative correlation between the TSH and academic performance which was not statistically significant. Keywords: Thyroid Function test, Academic performance, Hypothyroidism, Euthyroid and Hyperthyroidism.