The Incidence of Smoking Electronic Cigarettes Among Healthcare Students in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Background:

Electronic cigarette (E-cigarette) is a new trend in smoking, and it increased remarkably across the world. The aim of this study is to find the incidence of smoking E-cigarette among healthcare students at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (0KSAU-HS) in Riyadh. The objectives of this study are to identify the reasons of smoking E-cigarette among students, find the possibilities of replacing regular cigarette with E-cigarette in the process of quitting smoking, to assess the duration of smoking E-cigarette in comparison with the regular cigarette, and to find the main source of influence to smoke E-cigarette.

Methods:

Institutional review board (IRB) approval was obtained. The study was conducted in KSAU-HS campus in Riyadh by distributing soft and hard copy of 15 items questionnaire. A consent form to participate in the study was given as well. The sampling technique was convenience sampling and the number of participants was 658 students.

Results:

The results showed that in general the number of smokers is 113 out of 658 students (17%) and from these 113 smokers 72 student (64%) are regular cigarette smokers, 15 students (13%) E-cigarette smokers, and 26 students (23%) are both regular and E-cigarette smokers. We found that the reasons of smoking E-cigarette are most likely because it contains flavors (33%), easy to get and use (19%), and odorless (17%). 23 students (56%) of E-cigarette smokers are in the process of quitting smoking while the other 18 students (44%) are not. The duration of smoking E-cigarette was mostly less than 1 to 2 hours (88%) while in regular cigarette, the majority used to smoke 1 to 10 cigarettes (64%). The main source of influence for smoking electronic cigarette was friends (82%) followed by family (13%) and finally commercials (5%).

Conclusions:

In conclusion, E-cigarette is a new trend among healthcare students that should be taken seriously to prevent its spread. Also, due its ease to use, it is important to increase the restrictions of using E-cigarette in the public. Majority of E-cigarette users were influenced by their friends, therefore, it needs more awareness about the adverse effect of E-cigarette smoking.