Dicle University Medicine Faculty students knowledge, attitude and behaviour about smoking

Background: Tobacco products are the largest cause of avoidable death and disease in world. Doctors have influence on the health of the society by providing treatment and preventation of diseases and as being role models. This study was planned in order to determine the smoking pevalence, attitude and behavior of medicine students.Method: The study was conducted during the 2007-2008 school year with 657 of the total 470 students in the Dicle University Medical Faculty, who were available and agreed to participate in the study by completing a 58 question form. 9 question form excluded from the study. 461 (70.1%) question form evaluated to this study. Statistical analyses were done with SPSS 12.0 programme. Descriptive statistics was used for statistical analysis. p<0.05 değeri anlamlı olarak kabul edildi.Results: 80.7 % was male and 19.3 % was female. The mean age was 22.6 (±2.25). In our study smoking prevalence was detected as 19.8 %. Smoking prevalance in first class was 11.1 % and reach to 26.3 % in sixth class.Conclusion: Nowadays, most of the mortal diseases patogenesis depens on tobacco. Medicine students rank as a central position in the war against smoking. We believe that, education abuot harmful effects of smoking should be started in earlier years of medical school and must be go on during education, support must be given to the students who want to quit smoking, maximum effort must be given to encouragement of cessation cigarette, especially never smoked students must be prevented for not to initiate smoking.