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Description
Smoking is the single most avoidable cause of disease, disability, and death affecting the world's population today. While research has shown that mortality is strongly related to smoking, and that mortality is strongly related to perceived general health, the association between perceived health status and smoking has not yet been well established and has not been recently described for California's diverse population. Using the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) 2007 Adult dataset, this cross-sectional study examined the association between smoking status and self-rated health in men and women in California's adult (age >18 years old) population. The CHIS is a population-based telephone survey using random digit dialing samples of landline and cellular telephone numbers, as well as list samples to augment the yield for certain racial and ethnic groups and an area sample to assess non-response bias. While bivariate analyses revealed a statistically significant relationship between self-rated health status and the exposure variables smoking status (p-value < 0.0001), age group (p-value < 0.0001), marital status (p-value < 0.0001), BMI (p-value < 0.0001), education (p-value < 0.0001), race (p-value < 0.0001), poverty level (p-value < 0.0001), and physical activity (p-value < 0.0001), no statistically significant relationship was found between self-rated health and gender, females and males did not differ in the way they rated their health status, p-value= 0.1184; no statistically significant relationship was found between self-rated health and diet, those who reported eating fast food at least once in the past week did not rate their health status any differently from those who reported not having fast food in the past week, p-value= 0.7626; and no statistically significant relationship was found between self-rated health and access to care, those who reported seeing a doctor at least once in the past 12 months did not rate their health status any differently when compared to those who reported not seeing a doctor in the past 12 months, p-value= 0.6164. Multivariate logistic regression analysis found that the odds of rating one's health as poor was almost four times higher among current smokers as among non-smokers, after adjusting for age group, marital status, BMI, education, race, gender, poverty level, physical activity, diet and access to care. This association is statistically significant at a p-value < 0.0001 (Odds Ratio= 3.39, 95% Confidence Interval: 1.92 - 6.01). The current findings add to the large literature base regarding the adverse effects of smoking and suggest that these effects are apparent when measuring self-rated health. Self-rated health status is a marker for a variety of subclinical diseases and/or early morbidity.
