Alyaa Farouk Abdel Fattah Ibrahim^{1, 2,}, Arwa Abdulaziz Alhamed³, Ghadir Mohammad Almusa⁴

Malnutrition during students’ early life inhibits normal growth and affects their mental developmental. Several factors may contribute to the negligence of healthy nutrition practices among college students. The current study aimed to identify nutrition related factors affecting academic performance of female health science students. Methodology: One hundred seventy-two female health sciences students were included in an institutional-based cross-sectional study at KSAU-HS, Riyadh. Data were collected using youth students’ bio-socio-demographic and lifestyle structured interview questionnaire. Results: medicine students tended to have higher Body Mass Index (BMI)s compared to nursing students. About two tenth (20.8%) of the medicine students were overweight compared to only 14% of the nursing students, and 7% of the nursing students were obese compared to 8.3% of the medicine students. On the other hand, 22% of the nursing students were identified as underweight compared to 12.5% of the medicine students. BMI was significantly associated with Grade Point Average (GPA) among nursing students (τ_b =0.120, p=0.029). Yet, it did not show significant correlation with GPA among medicine students (τ_b =0.067, p=0.481). However, BMI was highly correlated with GPA for the total participants (t=6.355, Sig.=0.000, 95%CI=1.111-2.112). Highly significant correlations were found between BMI and all assessed socio-demographic and lifestyle factors except age. In addition, highly significant correlations were detected between GPA and all assessed socio-demographic and lifestyle factors. Conclusion: Study participants’ BMI was highly correlated with their GPA. High significant correlations were detected between BMI, GPA and all assessed socio-demographic factors including; academic semester, college, marital status, parents’ education, father’s occupation and family income but did not show significant correlation with age. In addition, BMI and GPA showed high significant correlation with all assessed lifestyle factors including; stress, TV watching, computer/electronic use, physical activity, daily sleeping time and day naps.

nutrition status, BMI, academic performance, GPA, life style