Background: as medical sciences students are going to be health care staff, and health care staff health affects the wellbeing of patients, monitoring of all aspects of their health including mental and social health are vital. In this study, we report the mental and social health status and the relation between them in medical sciences students.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study which is done on 607 first semester medical sciences students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences from September first to November first, 2017. Data collection was web-based. Twenty-eight item generalized health questionnaire and the 20-item Keyes questionnaire were used to investigate mental and social health, respectively. Ordinal logistic regression was used to investigate any independent association between mental and social health status and predictor factors.

Results: Of all students, 338(55.7%) were male. Mean age of the participants was 20.51±2.02 years. Of all participants,144(23.7%) had abnormal mental health, and 499(82.2%) had intermediate social health. According to the multivariable analyses Keyes score was independently associated with the mental health status (Adjusted OR: 0.794; 95% CI: 0.761-0.828), lower GHQ score (Adjusted OR: 0.862; 95% CI: 0.826-0.898) and lower family dimension (Adjusted OR: 0.295; 95% CI: 0.110-0.794) were independently associated with social health status.

Conclusion: a very low proportion of students in this study had severe mental disorder and low level of social health status. Social health status of the students was independently associated with their mental health status and vice versa.

Keywords: Health status; Mental health; Community psychiatry; Students, Medical; Iran