RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Stability of empathy among undergraduate medical students: A longitudinal study at one UK medical school

Background: Empathy is important to patient care. The prevailing view is that empathy declines during university medical education. The significance of that decline has been debated. This paper reports the findings in respect of two questions relating to university medical education: 1. Do men and women medical students differ in empathy? 2. Does empathy change amongst men and women over time? Methods: The medical course at the University of Cambridge comprises two components: Core Science (Years 1-3) and Clinical (Years 4-6). Data were obtained from repeated questionnaire surveys of medical students from each component over a period of four years: 2007-2010. Participation in the study was voluntary. Empathy was measured using two subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index: IRI-EC (affective empathy) and IRI-PT (cognitive empathy). We analysed data separately for men and women from the Core Science and Clinical components. We undertook missing value analyses using logistic regression separately, for each measure of empathy, to examine non-response bias. We used Student’s t-tests to examine gender differences and linear mixed effects regression analyses to examine changes over time. To assess the influence of outliers, we repeated the linear mixed effects regression analyses having excluded them. Results: Women displayed statistically significant higher mean scores than men for affective empathy in all 6 year