This study aims to assess the attitudes of Egyptian medical students and interns towards neuroscience and neurology.

Neurological diseases comprise a leading cause of illness and mortality, with around three billion people affected with a neurological condition worldwide in 2021. A large portion of these conditions are chronic and require long-term care and follow-up. Therefore, it is crucial for medical students, and eventually, physicians to become familiar and confident in dealing with such cases. 

We conducted a multicenter cross-sectional study in 13 universities in Egypt using an online self-administered questionnaire during September 2024. The questionnaire included demographic data and Likert-scale questions (from 1 to 5) assessing the interest, difficulty, confidence, and knowledge of the neurology specialty, with the higher score favoring the specialty. Participants were designated to have neurophobia if having a combined score of difficulty and confidence ≤ 4. We asked about perceived causes of neurophobia and methods to combat this phenomenon.

A total of 367 surveys were completed by 190 medical students (who studied clinical neurology) and 177 interns. The prevalence of neurophobia was 38.4%; with 26.3% and 51.4% in students and interns respectively.  Neurology was perceived as the second most difficult specialty after cardiology, and the second least comfortable to manage patients after geriatrics. Neurophobia has various perceived causes, such as difficult neuroanatomy (52.3%), poor prognosis (30.8%), rare diagnoses (30%), difficult neuroscience (25.3%), poor teaching (22.6%), and limited exposure to patients (22.1%). The study participants concluded that improving this issue may be through more integrated teaching, improving the teaching abilities, and more teaching of neuroanatomy and bedside clinical cases. 

Our research underscores the extent and causes of neurophobia among Egyptian medical students and interns. Therefore, we must undertake significant efforts to implement potential preventive measures, including new concepts and educational methods to develop proficiency in this field.