Students training to become doctors, nurses and pharmacists spend years learning how to keep others healthy, yet long hours and exam pressure can leave little room for their own exercise, sleep and diet. Measuring their habits accurately is the first step towards helping them. A new study from Iran has tested whether a widely used healthy lifestyle questionnaire works well for these students.

Researchers at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences assessed the Persian version of the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II with 501 students. The findings appear in BMC Psychology. Six in ten participants were women, most were aged 18 to 25, and they came from courses ranging from medicine and dentistry to laboratory sciences, pharmacy and non-medical subjects.

The questionnaire has 52 items covering six areas of daily life. These are taking responsibility for one’s health, physical activity, nutrition, spiritual growth, relationships with others and stress management. It has been translated into many languages and used with groups from Taiwanese women to American truck drivers.

The researchers first tested whether students’ answers fitted the six areas the questionnaire was designed to measure. Some standard measures of fit were acceptable, but stricter checks were less favourable, so the evidence was mixed. Every item was meaningfully linked to its intended area.

A follow up analysis suggested that the answers might be better described by eight groupings rather than six, and several items appeared to overlap with more than one area. Even so, the six original domains could still largely be recognised in the data. The nutrition section performed least well, a weakness also reported in versions used in other countries.

Reliability was high. Each of the six sections, and the questionnaire as a whole, gave consistent scores, which means the items within each area hang together well.

The findings suggest that the Persian questionnaire is a useful tool for tracking healthy habits among medical sciences students, but that its six part structure should not be taken for granted. The researchers advise caution when comparing scores between groups and recommend further testing before the questionnaire is used to judge the success of health programmes.

The study has limits. All participants came from one university, and the data were collected in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when daily routines were disrupted. Both main analyses used the same group of students, so the alternative structure needs to be confirmed in a new sample.

Healthy lifestyles among future health professionals matter beyond their own wellbeing, because doctors and nurses who look after themselves may be better placed to advise patients. Reliable tools for measuring those habits are an important part of supporting them.