Prevalence of cigarette smoking among Iranian medical students and its relationship with mental health

ABSTRACT

As today’s medical sciences students have a crucial role in offering consultation on smoking and its effects, this study aimed to determine the prevalence of cigarette smoking among Irainian medical sciences students and its relationship with mental health. In this cross-sectional study, 542 Irainian medical sciences students were randomly selected from the students’ name lists. After a phone call to explain the purposes of the study, the questionnaires included a cigarette smoking checklist, a socio-demographic information questionnaire, and a general health questionnaire (GHQ-28) were sent to the students through WhatsApp messaging application. The prevalence of cigarette smoking among Irainian medical students was %6.6. The mean (SD) score of depression among smoker students was significantly higher than among non-smokers (p = 0.007). The differences between mean scores of other sub-domains of mental health and total mental health were not significant. According to multivariate logistic regression, the chance of cigarette smoking was about 24 times more in students with anxiety than in those without anxiety [OR: 3.09; 95%CI: 1.07 to 8.89]. Furthermore, the chance of cigarette smoking was about 9 times [OR: 8.69; 95%CI: 3.15 to 24.00] more in boys compared to girls. It appears that considering psychological disorders besides other interventions could be an effective strategy for the prevention of smoking.

KEYWORDS:

• Smoking
• mental health
• medical students

Acknowledgment

We sincerely thank all students who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This study was approved by National Agency for Strategic Research in Medical Education (Code: 970270) and the ethics committee of the research and technology deputy of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences (IR.TBZMED.REC.1399.1158). The informed written consent was obtained from all participants. All methods were carried out by relevant guidelines and regulations (Declaration of Helsinki).

Availability of data and materials

The data used in this work is not available publicly but could be provided by the author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by National Agency for Strategic Research in Medical Education. The funder had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, or manuscript production.