Smoking habits of sixth year medical students and anti-smoking measures in Portugal.

OBJECTIVES

To study the smoking habits of 6th year Portuguese medical students and assess their knowledge and acceptance of anti-smoking measures and how they felt these would impact on public health.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

We conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study, in which a self-administered, anonymous questionnaire was made available online to the target population (6th year Portuguese medical students). The relationships between some of the variables were analysed using contingency tables and the chi2 test, with p<0.05 taken as statistically significant.

RESULTS

We obtained 255 answers to our questionnaire. We found an 18.04% prevalence of smokers. The majority of smokers smoked 1 - 10 cigarettes per day, with men smoking more, and most of them had begun their habit between 13 and 18 years of age, with women beginning later. 36.96% of smokers had already made an attempt to quit smoking. The great majority of the respondents agreed with the anti-smoking measures listed in the questionnaire. Furthermore, they expected these measures to have a positive impact on smoking and on smoking-related morbidity and mortality. Only 34.90% of the students judged smoking cessation to be sufficiently taught in their curricula.

CONCLUSIONS

The results are in accordance with the population in general in terms of the prevalence of smokers, the age of beginning smoking and a high prevalence of women smokers. There appears to be across-the-board agreement with anti-smoking measures, along with hope for a reduced general and individual consumption and morbi-mortality.