Publication:

Relationship between personality traits and tobacco smoking behaviour in outpatients of a tertiary care hospital, Mandya

Background This study was conducted on 168 patients to assess nicotine dependence in tobacco smokers and to compare their personality profiles with non-smokers.

Methods The patients were grouped into nicotine dependent and non-nicotine dependent based on the DSM IV-TR, Personality profile assessed with the big five personality test. informed consent was taken before collecting the data. The test of significance used was independent sample t-test and one way ANOVA.

Results A total of 168 participants were included in this study, comprised of 84 smokers (50%) and 84 non-smokers (50%). Smokers revealed a higher score in neuroticism compared to non-smokers (25.19+4.33 vs. 24.07+3.99), higher extroversion (19.02+4.67 vs. 18.64+6.18) lower Conscientiousness (20.30+6.64 vs. 21.37+5.18) and lower openness to experience (22.14+6.24 vs. 22.75+5.25). mean score of neuroticism is significantly more in moderate (26.12+5.50) level nicotine dependence, openness to experience showed significantly high (28.4+2.31) level nicotine dependence. 41.6% of smokers belong to low to moderate level ND, 30.9% moderate level ND, 22.6% high-level ND, and 0.04% low-level ND. Neuroticism showed health concerns as the reason to quit smoking than those who did not.

Conclusions 39.2% of the participants did not even attempt to quit smoking and the most common reason to quit smoking was health concerns and social factors so it is important to educate these individuals and motivate them to quit smoking. Major causes of relapse were social factors and media/advertisement. Hence strict rules against the display of smoking can help to prevent relapse