College student perceived stress levels have been steadily rising over the past decade. Not surprisingly, this increasing level of perceived stress is correlated with a 50% rise in the number of college students meeting the clinical criteria for one or more mental health issues between 2013-2021. In addition to mental health, chronically elevated perceived stress levels are also correlated with a deterioration of metabolic health, resulting in obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. However, less is known about whether elevated stress in college is contributing to an earlier onset of these metabolic diseases. Thus, we sought to determine the stress levels of our physiology students and compare them to some metabolic parameters to assess whether perceived stress is correlated with worse metabolic health in college students. Students in the Cellular, Anatomical, and Physiological Sciences (CAPS) program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have been performing oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT) on themselves as part of their third-year physiology laboratory course for over 20 years. In the 2025-26 school year, we surveyed our third-year students to determine their stress levels and then compared them to their OGTT results. Our preliminary analysis shows that 16.7% of our students reported being in the highest stress level as determined by the Perceived Stress Scale 14 (PSS-14). There was a strong trend for the moderate and high stress students to have worse glucose tolerance than the low stress students. Surprisingly, 25% of students met the criteria for glucose intolerance, even though their average age was only 20.3±0.2 years. We will continue surveying our students over the following years to see if these trends hold. Nevertheless, these data are concerning and suggest that faculty can do better to support our students’ health to ensure that they can perform at their best to achieve their goals without sacrificing their health. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.
Popke et al. (Fri,) studied this question.