Are healthy lifestyle behaviors positively associated with the academic achievement of the university students?

Abstract

Introduction: Universally, the number of students attendingthe university education is high and increasing. The future ofacademic graduates is affected by their academic achievement.The purpose of the research was to assess the correlationamong academic achievement and healthy lifestyle behaviors inuniversity students.Methods: This cross-sectional research was conducted on 262university students studying in the selected faculties of BabolUniversity of Medical Sciences based on multi stage samplingtechnique. The students were categorized to low and highacademic achievement groups according to grade point average(GPA) score at the end of the semesters. The health-promotinglifestyle profile with six domains was applied to determinehealthy lifestyle behaviors. To investigate the adjusted correlationamong the health promoting lifestyle’s domains and academicachievement, the multi-variable logistic regression was used.Results: The average age of the university students was 21.36± 2.28 years. According to the results, some domains of healthylifestyle behaviors between the low and the high academicachievement groups were different significantly. The resultsdemonstrated that the spiritual growth (the only domain of healthylifestyle behaviors) (P=0.002) and living situation (P=0.043) weresignificant factors affecting academic achievement.Conclusion: The findings suggest that the public health andeducation professionals should try to improve the students’academic achievement through holding periodic trainingworkshops to promote the their spiritual growth and also considermore quotas for native students to the universities.

Keywords

• healthy lifestyle
• behaviors
• academic achievement
• students