Trends in Smoking among University Students between 2005-2012 in Sakarya, Turkey

Turkey protects its entire population of 75 million people with all the MPOWER measures at the highestlevel. The aim of this study is to make a comparison of smoking and addiction data obtained from SakaryaUniversity students in 2005-6 and 2012-13. A total of 4,200 (2,500 and 1,700 for each academic year) students atSakarya University in Sakarya, Turkey, were randomly selected for sampling purposes. The selected participantsrepresented Sakarya University students. Data were collected using a pretested anonymous and confidential,self-completed questionnaire which took 15-20 minutes to complete and Fagerstrom Test for nicotine dependence.Chi-squared, Spearman correlation, and binary logistic regression tests were used to define associations, ifany. The level of significance was kept at alpha=0.05. Smoking prevalance dropped by 8.5% (from 26.9% to18.5%). Male gender, older age, high family smoking index, low self-rated school success, and high peer smokerproportion were common variables that have correlation with smoking status. In the binary logistic regressiontest the highest contributor to “being a smoker” was found to be the rate of peer smokers. Having all friendssmoking puts the student a a 47.5 and 58.0 times higher risk for smoking for males and females, respectively.Our results suggest an admirable diminution of smoking prevalance among Sakarya University students, whichcan be attributed to MPOWER protection.