2017 Volume 8 Issue 3-4 Pages 45-53
Even though smoking is closely related to drinking and other negative health behaviors, there are few papers on the relationship between smoking and checkup attendance. We investigated whether smoking histories related to differences in annual checkup attendance.
We obtained undergraduate students’ smoking histories at annual medical checkups at a mid-sized private university in Japan. We examined a dataset containing the data for all 17,831 male and 2,740 female undergraduates from a typical Japanese university’s regular spring medical checkups for every year from 2008 to 2013; it included whether an undergraduate had attended the checkup and had ever smoked. We investigated the number of times undergraduates attended the checkup by gender, survey year, student’s year of study, and smoking history.
Compared to undergraduates who had never smoked, those who currently or historically smoked attended significantly fewer annual checkups. The difference was more remarkable among men.
The results suggested that more could be done to encourage undergraduates who smoke to have checkups, which could provide an opportunity for smoking cessation advice and treatment.
