Comparison of Clinic Visits among Children of Smoking and Non-Smoking Families

Complications of cigarette smoking are of the major obstacles of a society. Both active and passive smoking cause various forms of diseases in men, women and children. Since almost one third of the world''s population are children under 14 years of age, preventing the unwanted health consequences of involuntary smoking can help in improvement of health as well as the health level of the society. In cooperation with the "Iran Statistics Center" and by using PPS method a number of families required for the study were selected among 22 districts of Tehran. After obtaining a consent, a questionnaire was filled out by a physician through interviewing the families randomly. In this study, 214 families were questioned out of which 129 had at least one smoker member in their family (60.2%). A total number of 825 individuals were studied (including 270 men, 281 women and 274 children under the age of 14), out of which 87 men (32.2%), 42 women (14.9%) and overall 129 subjects (23.4% of the population over the age of 14 and 15.6% of the general population) were smokers. The mean number of visits to the physician by the children of all families was 3.7±1.8 per year. This number was 2±0.9 and 4.7±1.56 in the non-smoking and smoking families respectively (p=0.000).Mean exhaled CO level of a non-smoker or passive smoker of a smoking family was 20.2±5.8; whereas this rate was 6.6±3.5 in a non-smoker member of a non- smoking family (p=0.000). Comparison of the number of visits does not significantly indicate the disease-inducing role of passive smoking but only that these visits are more in families that smoke. (Tanaffos 2006; 5(4): 47-52)