Impacts of smoking on the quality of life of medical students, an integrative review

Abstract

Introduction: when entering university, although it entails positive feelings related to the dreams and goals of academics, it can sometimes become a difficult period, which leaves students vulnerable to starting and/or maintaining the use of psychotropic drugs, despite the use of tobacco. Among young academics in the health area, this situation becomes more serious due to the close emotional contact with different people and with their pains. In addition, the beginning of a graduation has an impact on the individual's psychological aspects, as it is something new, stressful and full of expectations created by the student himself or his family members. In the group of undergraduate medical students, more specifically, there is great coercion to be a good professional before society, friends and family, a factor that contributed as a stressful trigger for the tendency to smoke. Objective: to verify smoking and the like in the student population, more specifically in undergraduate medical students. Materials and methods: the present study is an integrative review, in which the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) method was used, which consists of the QUORUM (Quality of Reporting of Meta-Analyses) recommendations, in which it was decided to include studies in Portuguese and limit the search temporally to 2020 to 2023. The search bases were Pubmed, Scielo and Google Scholar, with search based on the controlled and uncontrolled descriptors of Descriptors in Health Sciences (DeCS) and Boolean operator “and”. Results: A total of 1,300 publications were found, arranged as follows: 185 studies on the Scielo platform, 902 articles on Scholar Google and 226 articles on Pubmed. The number of studies included that answered the study's guiding question (n=16), of which there was a higher prevalence of smoking in males, with a greater tendency in the initial periods and a decrease in use in the clinical cycle. In some studies, most of the sample showed knowledge about the harmful effects of smoking, but no carriers of such complications were seen. Conclusion: the studies show a prevalence of smoking among medical students from different Brazilian institutions. This is an extremely worrying fact, not only because of the damage it can cause to their physical and mental health, but also because of the impairment in the development and structuring of their cognitive-behavioral and emotional skills as future health professionals.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/uniknowindevolp-065