Prevalence of Smoking and Its Associated Factors among Female Medical Students in King Abdulaziz University, KSA, Jeddah

Background: Today's medical students will play a prominent role in future efforts to prevent and control tobacco use in the community, in addition they are considered as a paradigm for safe and healthy behavior, nevertheless the published literature revealed that they are not the least to be smokers. The current study aimed to estimating the prevalence of smoking among this group and to elaborate the risk factors associated with the smoking habit among them. Material and subjects: This is a cross sectional study, where randomly selected 400 female medical students from 2nd-6th academic year in the faculty of medicine at King Abdul Aziz University were invited to be enrolled in the study and to respond to a predesigned self-administered questionnaire. The response rate was 77.5%.  Results: Thirty two students out of 310 (10.3%) were current smokers, and the prevalence varied among students according to their academic year, it accounted for 10.5% among 2nd year, 11.3% in 3rd year, 8.5% in 4th year,  8.6% in 5th year and 12.0% in 6th year. We found that 21% of all smokers were daily smoker, regarding smoking status of the parents it was found that 13% of the smoking fathers have smoking daughters (p=0.285), and 29% of the smoking mothers have smoking daughters (p0.002). Conclusion and recommendations: 10% of our female medical students were smokers, significant factor associated with likelihood of being smoker was smoking status of the mother, and other factors are not statistically significant including smoking status of the father, brother or sister, age of the student, marital status and level of grades. We recommended initiating and supporting antismoking health education campaign using different media and targeting various sectors in general and females in specific.