Speaker Biography

Emine Arguder

Bayindir Health Group, Turkey

Title: Awareness of the patients and their relatives about the health problems occurred by passive smoking

Biography:

Abstract:

Objectives: Passive smoking describes the unintended exposure of non-smokers to tobacco smoke and is an important public health problem. In all over the world, 40% of children and 34% of non-smoker adults are exposed to cigarette smoke.  It has long been known that tobacco smoke has a detrimental effect on people who doesn’t smoke. We aimed to evaluate the knowledge of the patients and their relatives about the health problems occurred by passive smoking.

Materials and methods: Our study was applied with the volunteers from patients and their relatives in the outpatient clinics of Smoking Cessation and Chest Diseases. A questionnaire was used to evaluate the demographic characteristics and the knowledge of the patients and relatives about results of passive smoking . The questionnaire included 17 statements that included the definition and results of passive smoking. For participants some options were presented "I agree", ”I disagree“ or "I don’t know".

Results: 520 participants were included in the study. The mean age of the participants was 42,73 ± 15,40, 328 (63,10%) were male and 192 (36,90%) were female. 41,70% of the participants were smokers, 42,50% had never smoked, 15,80% had stopped smoking. Most participants (89,10%) knew the definition of passive smoking. Knowledge was high in some statements like passive smoking relation with heart disease, asthma, lung cancer, bronchitis, pneumonia, cardiovascular diseases and COPD. However, relationship between passive smoking and diabetes mellitus, dementia and sudden infant death were not known well. To the statements of “In infants of smokers, sudden infant death in sleep is more common” (p: 0.037) and “in children of smokers cough, sputum and wheezing are more common” (p: 0.005), agreement of smokers was less than who never smoked and than those who quit smoking. The majority of those who did not agree in the statement “Cough, sputum and wheezing are more common in the children of smokers” were male (p: 0.033).

Conclusion: In our study, the participants had known some of the harmless effects of passive smoking on health. Although the smoke-free airspace policy, which has been implemented for ten years in our country, has increased the public's awareness of the hazards of cigarette smoke; this is not enough. Therefore, people can be protected from the damages of passive smoking with the application of laws and increasing public awareness. Especially parents can take some protective measures for their children by the awareness of all passive smoking hazards.