Determinants Number of Cigarette Smoked with Iranian Adolescents: A Multilevel Zero Inflated Poisson Regression Model

Background: the present study was conducted to know about the association between amount of smoking and mentalhealth plus demographic factors in the iranian adolescents.methods: data of this research was drawn from the national health survey in iran from april 1999-march 2000. all 1745adolescents aged 15-20 yr that were residence in the eight northwest provinces of iran, were included in this study. in orderto evident zero-inflation and because of sampling design, multilevel zero-inflated poisson (zip) regression applied foranalysis of data. we analyzed data with programs written with s-plus.results: zero-inflated part of zip model shows that gender of female effects to increase the chance of not to smoke cigaretteat all (p< 0.001) and older adolescents are less at risk of smoking than younger (p= 0.036). it also shows that, unemployed(p= 0.028) and housewife (p= 0. 003), adolescents are more at risk of smoking compare with student adolescents.under poisson part of this model, depression (p= 0.012) and gender of female (p< 0.001) are indirectly associated withnumber of cigarette smoked per day by adolescents.conclusion: among adolescent smokers, males smoke more number of cigarettes than females, younger teenager are moreat risk of being a smoker than older ones and dropping out of high school is an important risk factor for smoking. we didnot find any relation between mental disorders and being a smoker while we did for the relation between number ofsmoked cigarette (nsc) and depression.