Health-Related Quality of Life With Regard to Smoking, Consumption of Alcohol, and Sports Participation

BACKGROUND: Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is an important determinant in a person’s life. OBJECTIVES: In this study aimed at physical education students, alcohol consumption and smoking as risk factors and sports as a healthy factor could affect HRQoL. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This study was an analytical cross-sectional study. For our purpose, the subjects (n = 519) were asked to answer the SF-36 questionnaire (short form health survey for HRQOL). To analyze the data, two-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), the independent-samples t-test, and Pearson correlation coefficient were conducted. In this study, the P < 0.05 was considered a significant difference, and due to a Bonferroni correction, for ANOVAs tests, a P < 0.0125 was considered a significant difference. RESULTS: The results suggest that statistically significant differences for alcohol consumption were only obtained from the role-emotional (RE) scale, in which drinkers had lower mean scores than nondrinkers. For smoking, significant differences were obtained from the scales of RE, vitality (VT), emotional well-being (EW), social functioning (SF), and general health (GH), in which nonsmokers outdid smokers. The combination of alcohol drinking and smoking led to statistically significant lower scores on the RE scale and strongly destroyed the role-emotional part of HRQOL. CONCLUSIONS: It can be concluded that smoking and alcohol consumption may be related to poor HRQOL in physical education and sports students despite the fact that they regularly engage in sports programs that could positively affect their HRQOL.