Hamam Al Naemi

The present study aims to find the incidence of smoking among the youth of Ras Al Khaimah (UAE). It is assumed that adolescence and young adulthood are the most susceptible stages to start tobacco use. This study mainly focuses on analyzing the age patterns in which the youth is mostly inclined towards smoking, finding the major causes and factors that influence this inclination, and creating awareness about the harmful effects of smoking on their health. A structured questionnaire consisting of 15 questions was administered among 116 randomly selected participants. The main parameters of the study were prevalence of smoking, age, category of responder, number of cigarette /day, reason, whether they tried to stop smoking, methods used to stop smoking, awareness about passive killer and whether they got any advice from parents/guardians regarding smoking etc. The results shows that many sociodemographic, environmental, behavioral and personal factors are responsible for smoking. More than 88.37% of young adults get this habit at the age below 18 years either directly or indirectly and family/friends play a significant role in this habit. Only an insignificant 9% benefitted from the awareness programs. This emphasizes the importance of creating more awareness programs for the youth. The study comes to the conclusion that more longitudinal and cohort analyses with a large number of volunteers is necessary to examine these trends more closely. The findings demonstrate considerable heterogeneity in smoking among young adults. So it is the time to warrant immediate attention from the public health community.