Volume 27, Issue 3 (Published 24 July 2013)                   Med J Islam Repub Iran 2013 | Back to browse issues page

XML Print


Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran. , lhhalimi20@yahoo.com
Abstract:   (5035 Views)

  Background: Smoking has physical, psychological, and social impacts on women’s health and subsequently the community’s health. Therefore, it is important to have an estimation of smoking among Iranian women.

  Since comprehensive data are not available in this respect, the authors performed a systematic review and metaanalyzed all high-quality studies in this field.

  Methods: All available electronic papers were searched by certain keywords and were included in this study according to the inclusion criteria regardless of the publication year. Furthermore, non-electronic resources including the final report of research projects, dissertations, unpublished papers (grey literature) and books published by the Iranian ministry of health were also evaluated in the study. The materials were assessed for their quality and meeting the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Considering the high degree of variability in many selected

  studies, we used random effect method for meta-analysis.

  Results: The highest and lowest rates of cigarette smoking among women were 10.5% and 0.04%, respectively. The prevalence rates of smoking were different in various subgroups ranging from 0 to 0.4% in students, 1.1 to 3.1% in adults, and 1.4 to 8.7% in all subgroups. According to the meta-analyses performed for the subgroups, the mean age of participants, performing the study in urban or rural areas, and the year of paper publication were major sources of heterogeneity.

  Conclusion: The studies were highly different with regard to their findings, and it seems that there is an age and time trend for the findings. Furthermore, the prevalence of smoking was different in various regions of the country.

Full-Text [PDF 416 kb]   (2228 Downloads)    
Type of Study: Original Research | Subject: Epidemiology

Rights and permissions
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.