Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Background: With the advancement in technology, internet addiction has become an issue which adversely affects the healthy life style. The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between internet addiction and health promoting lifestyle of the students and determine the effects of internet addiction on the health of students and to collect basic data to plan for preventing internet addiction and to improve students’ life style.

Methods: This descriptive and analytical study was done on 250 cases (140 females and 110 males) living in the dormitories of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2012. Stratified Random Sampling was used for selecting students, participation in the study was voluntary, tools of collecting data for this study was self-reported questionnaire consisting of three parts, the first part contained demographic information including age, sex, marital status, employment status, educational level, and educational status (grade point average) the second part was health promoting lifestyle (HPLP) questionnaire (52 questions) of Walker and colleagues and the third section of the questionnaire was “Young's Internet Addiction”. In order to analyze the data SPSS V.19 was used and results at the level of p<0/05 was considered significant.

Results: According to the findings of the study there is a significant relationship between internet addiction and promoting healthy lifestyles (p<0/001), and addicts to the internet are in adverse situation as compared to the internet users in terms of promoting healthy lifestyles. People addicted to the internet received significantly lower scores in spiritual growth (p<0/001), health responsibility (p<0/001), interpersonal relationships (p<0/001), stress management (p<0/001), physical activity (p<0/001), and nutrition (p<0/001) compared to ordinary users.

Conclusions: This study shows that internet addicts gain lower score in health promoting lifestyle and reveals necessity of interventions to correct methods of internet using and training students to improve their lifestyle.