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

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 horizontal ellipsis medical sciences students and its relationship with mental health. In this cross-sectional study, 542 horizontal ellipsis 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 horizontal ellipsis 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.