The prevalence of cigarette smoking among students of Iran's universities: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Studentship period is a time when most behavioral traits are being created and fixed; this is a special time when students may start smoking. Thus in the present research, prevalence of smoking in university students in Iran has been evaluated. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Having extensively explored Iranian and International databases (SID, Iranmedex, Magiran, Medlib, Irandoc, Pubmed, Google Scholar, and WHO) with broad keywords, we looked for relevant papers about the frequency of cigarette smoking among students in Iranian universities in recent years. We recruited only those primary papers with required information and acceptable methodology by reviewing their titles, abstracts, and full-texts. The main data about the prevalence of smoking, age and sex distribution of subjects, sample size, date, and location of studies were extracted from the full-text of eligible papers. RESULTS: A total of 22 valid articles were selected. Among the findings of these studies, the lowest and highest prevalence of smoking among male students was 13.4 and 39.9, respectively, while it was 0.7 and 25.5%, respectively, among female students. Meta-analysis results reveals that smoking frequency among male and female students in Iran's universities is 19.8% (17.7-21.9) and 2.2% (1.4-3.02), respectively. CONCLUSION: The variation of smoking in students in different universities shows that the tendency of smoking varies in different locations. Furthermore, compatible with the prevalence of smoking in the general population in Iran, female students smoke much less than male students.