Nearly one in 10 Emirati women smoke … but most won’t admit it
Almost one in 10 Emirati women are smokers but only a third of those admit to lighting up, a new study suggests.
The UAE Healthy Future Study found that 3 per cent of Emirati women and 36 per cent of men admitted to using tobacco in cigarettes, shisha or medwakh.
But when the group of almost 400 subjects was tested for cotinine, a substance produced when nicotine is metabolised, 9 per cent of women and 42 per cent of men gave a positive result.
It is the first time in the region that admitted smoking rates have been compared to biochemical data.
The results suggest that smoking rates among young Emiratis are likely to be higher than among their parents, putting the country at odds with many developed nations where the number of young people taking up the habit has fallen.
Earlier reports indicated that the smoking rate among UAE nationals was as low as 0.8 per cent in women and 24 per cent in men.
“It was kind of interesting that, for both men and women, there was a bit of a discrepancy between the self-reported rates and what we found biochemically,” said Andrea Leinberger-Jabari of New York University Abu Dhabi, the colead author of a paper reporting the results.
Ms Leinberger-Jabari said the fact that smoking was not considered socially or culturally acceptable, particularly among women, helped to explain why some people chose not to reveal it.
The real smoking rates could be higher than those indicated by the cotinine test because if people only smoke occasionally, they could sometimes produce a negative result.
The average age of subjects in the study was about 30, said Dr Raghib Ali, another of the paper’s authors from NYU Abu Dhabi.
As a result, based on the study’s findings, he said that smoking rates were “likely to be higher in younger men than older men, and younger women rather than older women”.
“It is more worrying in many ways because the adverse health effects are worse the longer you smoke,” Dr Ali said. “If young people are smoking more than their parents today, it’s the opposite to what’s happening in western countries, where the smoking rates have fallen.”
The overall smoking rates found among those surveyed were “very worrying”, particularly with the high level of diabetes in the UAE.
“Smoking regularly reduces your life expectancy by 10 years in western populations,” Dr Ali said. “In the UAE, it could be higher because of the high rates of diabetes. The combination of smoking and diabetes is extremely bad for your health.”
The study found that the median age for starting to smoke was 17.5 years.
Earlier research indicated that smoking is being taken up at a young age in the Emirates. A UAE University study last year suggested that 8.5 per cent of Arab children aged 12 to 14 in the country smoked.
Research for the latest study was carried out before last year’s introduction of a 100 per cent tobacco tax.
Ms Leinberger-Jabari said it would be interesting to see if there had been any change in smoking rates since the tax was first imposed.
“Some of the policy measures are really great for tobacco control, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she said. “As we move towards more measures to curb tobacco use among young people, hopefully that will lead to declines.”
The paper was produced as part of a pilot for the UAE Healthy Future Study, which aims to recruit 20,000 Emirati volunteers and analyse their health over the long term to better understand risk factors for conditions including obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
These are present at high rates in the UAE population despite a high standard of health care.
“Smoking is the number one risk factor for premature death, so it’s essential to have accurate data,” Dr Ali said.
The researchers will be carrying out more studies on tobacco use in the UAE and will be looking at, among other things, environmental exposure to tobacco smoke.
The paper is titled Patterns of Tobacco Use in the UAE Healthy Future Pilot Study and was published in the journal PLOS One.