Nursing students' attitudes towards coronary artery disease prevention

Background and Purpose: Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) is the major cause of limitation in adults' life. But it can be prevented by controlling its risk factors, modifying life style and educating the population about general health. Besides, health education is one of the important issues about changing life style. Nurses play an important role in health education .Thus this study was performed to determine Nursing Students' Attitudes towards the Prevention of Coronary Artery Disease. Methods: The samples of this cross-sectional study have been 136 of freshman to senior nursing students of Guilan University in the north of Iran selected by available sampling method. A questionnaire consisting of two sections was used to gather data. In the first section, the samples socio-demographic data were asked and the second section with 15 questions about nursing students’ attitude to coronary artery disease prevention .Data analysis was done by SPSS16 software using descriptive and inferential statistics such as Chi square, ANOVA and Pearson tests as appropriate. Results: The findings displayed that the samples mean age was 21.34±2.52. The majority of them were female (57.4%) and the freshman students (36%) and without the history of chronic disease (94.9%) and the majority of the students and their family didn’t have cardiac disease background (77.2%). But the relationship between the score of the attitude and sociodemographic variables in the students was not significant. The finding showed that the attitude score of 48.5% students was lower than the tool's mean score but the mean score of attitude increased as the educational years increased. Conclusion: Our findings showed that about half of the samples did not have the desired attitude towards the prevention of coronary artery disease; it is necessary to provide educational programs to create deep belief about the prevention of coronary artery disease, its importance and the students' responsibility about it.