Smoking and Illness Experience of Student Nurses: Birth Weight and Other Related Variables

Abstract

THE evident health hazards associated with smoking have been abundantly described (1-8). Increased efforts are now being devoted to preventing the excess mortality attributed to this practice. Morbidity data are also being marshaled (5, 6, 8-12) to dissuade the significant segment of society that is still seemingly unmoved by threats merely to the "quantity" of life. And this accent on disability is reinforced by efforts to identify persons who appear par¬ ticularly disposed both to adopt the smoking habit and to incur the impairments it seems to induce (6,13-20). This report compares the illness patterns of smokers and nonsmokers in a generally healthy and comparatively homogeneous population of 269 nursing students, who completed 3-year courses from 1954 through 1958 at The Brook¬ lyn Hospital. It also assesses selected biosocial attributes to which cigarette consumption appears to be related and presents limited data on birth weights of these nurses and their children, in light of the suspected influence of smoking on perinatal experience (21-28). 274: 979 (1966). (13) Heath, W. C.: Differences between smokers and non-smokers. Arch Intern Med 101: 377 (1958). (14) Thomas, C. B.: Characteristics of smokers compared with non-smokers in a population of healthy young adults, including observations on family history, blood pressure, heart rate, body weight, cholesterol and certain psychological traits. Ann Intern Med f53: 697 (1960).