Abstract
During January-April 2020, COVID-19 pandemic occurred in East China, and many medical students, implemented a home protection policy, resulting in significant changes in their physical exercise and lifestyle habits. This study aims to analyze the effects of physical exercise habits in their normal school life, changes in physical exercise and lifestyle habits during home protection on the occurrence of musculoskeletal pain (MSP) from multiple perspectives, and to provide new clues for the search of risk factors for MSP and alternative solutions for the prevention. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 900 randomly selected medical students of Nanjing Medical University, Jiangsu, China who had taken home protection using questionnaires. The presence of MSP in 9 body regions in the last 7 days was collected using the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ). The prevalence of MSP during home protection was 40.2% (n = 345; 95% CI 36.9%-43.4%). Multi-factor logistic regression analysis revealed that the females (OR 1.391; 95% CI 1.006–1.922), irregular physical exercise in school life (OR 1.648; 95% CI 1.157–2.347), and less than 6 hours of sleep per day during home protection (OR 1.474; 95% CI 1.020–2.131) were found to be risk factors for MSP.