A Study on the Effects of Smoking Habit to Health Status in Some Male Employees

일부 남성 직장인에서 관찰된 흡연행태가 건강상태에 미치는 성향연구

This study aims to find out the prevalence of smoking, and to analyze the effect of smoking for health status, and then to emphasize the necessity of stop smoking. The data used in this study are obtained from periodic health care programe at Health Care Center in a suburban hospital, and selected 435 males who have occupation. The independent varibles chosen for the analysis are general charactersitic variables and smoking habit. The dependent variables are designed to cover the health status of individual cases, and include blood pressure, blood cholesterol level with HDL-cholesterol and blood triglyceride level, recent symptoms and recently being managed diseases. The result of this study are summarized as follows. 1) Percentage of smoker by the age groups is highest in 4th decade, being 71.1%. The second and third ranks are 6th and 7th decades, being 53.5% and 44.4%, respectively. 2) In the view of socio-economic levels, smoking rate is higher in the groups who live at rural area and whoes occupation is labor or merchant. Smoking rate is significantly higher in the heavy drinking group. 3) Among the atherosclerotic risk factors, which include hypertension, HDL-cholesterol by total cholesterol ratio lower than 0.2 and triglyceride level higher than 200gm/dl, hypertension was not statistically associated with smoking, but others revealed statistically high association with smoking. 4) The groups who have the symptoms of severe fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms, pulmonary symptoms, palpitation and chest tightness havepositive association with smoking. 5) The groups who have hypertension with cardiovascular diseases and gastrointestinal diseases showed highly significant association with non-smoking. 6) In relation of the smoking habit to the atherosclerotic risk factor index, smokers have more atherosclerotic risk factors, but that is not statistically significant. 7) In relation of the smoking habit to the recent symptom index, smokers have more symptoms than non-smokers with statistical significance. In conclusion, smokers have worse health status than non-smokers especially in the atherosclerotic risk factors such as hypertension or abnormal blood lipid status and have more symptoms such as severe fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms, pulmonary symptoms, palpitation and chest tightness. And the campaingn against smoking should direct for the male in 4th decade because they have highest smoking rate.