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Background: Empathy is an important element of physician-patient communication. Empathy is linked to a number of attributes such as patient treatment compliance and satisfaction, better history taking and physical examination and therefore achieving better clinical outcomes. Previous research indicates that self-reported empathy among medical students declines during the course of their medical education and this decrease in empathy particularly happens when students enter clinical training. Very limited data is available on the concept of empathy among Iranian medical students. The aim of the present study was to investigate empathy among Iranian medical students and the possible differences between students of different levels of medical education.

Methods: The data were collected using convenient sampling. The Jefferson Questionnaire of Physicians Empathy-student version as well as a demographic …