Original ArticleExposure to Secondhand Smoke and Academic Performance in Non-Smoking Adolescents
Section snippets
Methods
From February 2003 to April 2004, a youth smoking survey with a self-administered questionnaire was conducted in Hong Kong with a high response rate (98%) from students in 85 mainstream secondary schools (non-international schools), which were randomly selected with a probability proportional to school enrollment size pursuant to the requirement of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey.7 Classes from Form 1 to 5 (grades 7-12 in the United States) of the participating schools (total = 1012 classes)
Results
Of all non-smoking students, 19% reported poor academic performance, 68% aspired to achieve a bachelor degree or higher, and 95% realized the harmful effects of SHS. Exposure to SHS at home (36%) and outside the home (66%) was common. One in 3 students lived with one or more smoker (33%), most commonly parents (24%), followed by non-parent family members (9%) and visitors (3%). Table I shows that poor academic performance was associated with male sex, older age, lower parental education,
Discussion
Our positive findings of strong dose-response relations suggest that adolescents are vulnerable to poor academic performance from SHS exposure. We have controlled for the potential confounding effects of socioeconomic status10 by both adjustment and stratification of two locally relevant indicators that adolescents should be able to report, namely parental education and housing type. The coherent findings for SHS exposure outside home, which mainly occurred in indoor environments such as
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2020, American Journal of Preventive MedicineCitation Excerpt :Using data from a nationally representative longitudinal cohort of adolescent non–tobacco users, this analysis found that exposure to secondhand smoke exhibited a statistically significant dose–response relationship with subsequent academic performance. Previous studies have found that exposure to secondhand smoke was associated with lower cognitive abilities in children and adolescents,11,13 and another study in Hong Kong showed an association between exposure to secondhand smoke and lower academic performance in youth.12 Findings from this analysis support and corroborate those from previous studies and further extend the body of literature from cross-sectional to longitudinal associations, potentially improving causal inference.
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Supported by Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health and the Department of Health (The Government of Hong Kong S.A.R.). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.