Assessing tobacco use in Swedish young adults from self-report and urinary cotinine: a validation study using the BAMSE birth cohort

OBJECTIVES: Studies on health effects of tobacco often rely on self-reported exposure data, which is subjective and can lead to misclassification. The aim of this study was to describe the prevalence of cigarette smoking, snus and e-cigarette use, as well as to validate self-reported tobacco use among young adults in Sweden. METHOD: Participants of a population-based Swedish cohort (n=3052), aged 22–25 years, assessed their tobacco use in a web questionnaire. Urinary cotinine was analysed in a subsample of the study population (n=998). The agreement between self-reported tobacco use and urinary cotinine was assessed using Cohen’s Kappa coefficient (κ) at a cut-off level of 50 ng/mL. RESULTS: Patterns of tobacco use differed between men and women. Among men, 20.0% reported daily snus use, 5.8% daily cigarette smoking and 5.6% any e-cigarette use. In contrast, 3.2% of the women reported daily snus use, 9.0% daily cigarette smoking and 2.4% any e-cigarette use. Among the tobacco use categories, daily snus users had the highest levels of cotinine. Of reported non-tobacco users, 3.5% had cotinine levels above the cut-off, compared with 68.0% among both occasional cigarette smokers and snus users, 67.5% among all e-cigarette users and 94.7% and 97.8% among daily cigarette smokers and snus users, respectively. Agreement between self-reported tobacco use and urinary cotinine was classified as strong for daily use of cigarettes (κ=0.824) and snus (κ=0.861), while moderate to weak for occasional smoking (κ=0.618), occasional snus use (κ=0.573) and any e-cigarette use (κ=0.576). CONCLUSIONS: We found high validity of self-reported tobacco use in our study population, particularly for daily tobacco use. Further, we found that daily snus users were exposed to high levels of cotinine. Together with previous findings, our results indicate good validity of self-reported tobacco use among young adults.