Prevalence of cigarette smoking among Iranian women: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Smoking has physical, psychological, and social impacts on women’s health and subsequently the community’s health. Therefore, it is important to have an estimation of smoking among Iranian women. Since comprehensive data are not available in this respect, the authors performed a systematic review and me-ta-analyzed all high-quality studies in this field. Methods: All available electronic papers were searched by certain keywords and were included in this study according to the inclusion criteria regardless of the publication year. Furthermore, non-electronic resources in-cluding the final report of research projects, dissertations, unpublished papers (grey literature) and books pub-lished by the Iranian ministry of health were also evaluated in the study. The materials were assessed for their quality and meeting the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Considering the high degree of variability in many se-lected studies, we used random effect method for meta-analysis. Results: The highest and lowest rates of cigarette smoking among women were 10.5% and 0.04%, respective-ly. The prevalence rates of smoking were different in various subgroups; ranging from 0 to 0.4% in students, 1.1 to 3.1% in adults, and 1.4 to 8.7% in all subgroups. According to the meta-analyses performed for the sub-groups, the mean age of participants, performing the study in urban or rural areas, and the year of paper publi-cation were major sources of heterogeneity. Conclusion: The studies were highly different with regard to their findings, and it seems that there is an age and time trend for the findings. Furthermore, the prevalence of smoking was different in various regions of the country.