Prevalence and Pattern of Smoking among Health Science Students in Nnamdi Azikiwe University Nigeria

Cigarette is a Group 1 carcinogen and a major global health concern. The morbidity and mortality attributable to cigarette smoking are preventable. Health workers and health professional students are presumed to be well informed about smoking and are, therefore, absolved from the menace of smoking: The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence and pattern of smoking among preclinical and health professional students, the knowledge they had of the health consequences of smoking and the reasons why they smoked.

This was a cross-sectional study of 277 students in which self-administered semi-structured questionnaire was used. The variables addressed were age, gender, academic level, departments, smoking or non-smoking status, age at first smoking, tried smoking even puffing, smoking duration, reasons for smoking, thought of smoking as having health benefit, adduced reasons for presuming smoking health benefit, awareness of dangers of smoking (dangers like asthma, COPD, hypertension, diabetes mellitus), reasons for not smoking, and reasons for stopping smoking. Analysis of the variables was doneusing descriptive statistics.

The number of subjects studied were 277. The subjects' mean age was 21.47±2.34 years; 161(58.3%) were female subjects, and majority of them were in their 2nd year. Eighty-five percent of the students were in the departments of Medicine, Physiology, Medical Laboratory Science and Physiotherapy. Seven [2.5%, (females 2(0.7%), males 5(1.8%)] of the respondents were current smokers. However, 35[12.6%, females 12(4.3%), males 23(8.3%)] smoked previously but stopped. The mean age of the respondents when they smoked for the first time was 15.78 ± 5.02 years. The main reasons why the respondents smoked were peer pressure (35%), stress (25%) and depression (20%). Furthermore, 15(5.4%) respondents reported that smoking had some health benefits whereas 84% of the students had good knowledge of the health dangers of cigarette smoking and this was the major reason for quitting smoking or not smoking.

The prevalence of smoking was low among health science students in this study. Stress, depression and peer pressure were the main reasons for smoking, and majority of them had sound knowledge of the health outcomes of smoking. There is a need for further creation of awareness of the dangers of smoking by health institutions to further reduce the prevalence of smoking among health professional students.