Smoking Rates Declined Among Those With Depression and Substance Use Disorder
A report released Tuesday from the National Institute on Drug Abuse finds that tobacco smoking rates are decreasing in people with major depression and substance use disorder.
The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reviews data from about 560,000 adults aged 18 and older who participated in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 2006 to 2019.
Researchers found that although individuals who had substance use disorder or major depression, or both, were more likely to smoke cigarettes than people without those disorders, there was a past-month smoking rate decline of 13.1% among adults with past-year major depressive episodes and by 8.2% among adults without.
According to the data, the difference in the past-month cigarette smoking among those with versus without past-year major depressive episodes significantly narrowed from 11.5% in 2006 to 6.6% in 2019.
For individuals with past-year substance use disorder, past-month cigarette smoking declined by 10.9% from 2006 to 2019, and 7.8% among adults without.
For those with both major depression and substance use disorder, past-moth smoking rates decreased by 13.7% during this 14-year period and by 7.6% among adults without either disorder.
“These declines tell a public health success story … [but] there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure tobacco use in patients with substance use disorder, depression or other psychiatric conditions continue[s] to decrease,” said Wilson Compton, the senior author of the study and deputy director at NIDA in a written statement.
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