Abstract:

Objectives: To study prevalence  and perception of tobacco use among 10th Standard students in an urban field practice area in Bangalore Background: Smoking is the most widespread , modern social disease worldwide; and one tobacco-related death occurring every 8 seconds in India, whereas avoiding tobacco adds 20 yrs to the life of a teenager. Efficient preventive programs implemented  among adolescents would considerably lower the morbidity and mortality in adults for chronic diseases. Materials and methods: High schools of the urban field practice area were selected by simple random sampling. Data was collected by self-administering of pre-structured questionnaire to all Class 10 students of each of the selected schools. Results: Overall prevalence of tobacco use was 17.9% .There was a statistically significant association between gender, parental influence and tobacco use among students (p<0.001). Majority of the students first used tobacco between age of 12 to 15 years. Among boys who use tobacco, smoking is more common and among girls, use of smokeless forms of tobacco  is more common.70.6%  students were aware that smoking is harmful to health. Conclusion: It is feasible and worthwhile to identify the nature of tobacco use among high school students. The results imply the importance of primordial prevention targeting the adolescent age group, to increase awareness of the hazards of  tobacco use on health, in order to reduce the tobacco-related morbidity and mortality in adulthood.

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