Cigarette smoking and psychiatric disorders in Hungary

Data from the United States and from several European countries show that patients with major mood disorders, schizophrenia and social phobia smoke at significantly higher rates than the general population. However, there are no published results on this field from Central Europe, including Hungary. In the present study, the rate of current and lifetime smoking of the consecutively screened outpatients with DSM-IV unipolar major depression (n=92), bipolar disorder (n=60), schizophrenia (n=80), schizoaffective disorder (n=42) and panic disorder without major depression (n=60) were assessed and the data were compared to the controls (n=5503), representative for the general population of Hungary. The results showed that, compared to controls, the rates of current and lifetime smoking were significantly higher among patients with unipolar major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, but not among patients with panic disorder without major depression. The findings support previous findings from other countries on the strong relationship between cigarette smoking and major mood and schizophrenic spectrum disorders.