© 2001 American Public Health Association
Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable is with the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Amelie Ramirez is with the Center for Cancer Control Research, Baylor College of Medicine, Waco, Tex. Roberto Villareal is with the Department of Family Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. Gregory A. Talavera is with the Division of Health Promotion, School of Public Health, San Diego State University, San Diego, Calif. Edward Trapido is with the Department of Epidemiology, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami, Miami, Fla. Lucina Suarez is with the Texas Department of Health, Austin. José Marti is with the Department of Surgery, Brookdale Hospital Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY. Alfred McAlister is with the Center for Health Promotion Research and Development, University of TexasHouston Health Science Center. All of the authors are with the National Hispanic Leadership Initiative on Cancer: En Acción. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Eliseo Pérez-Stable, MD, 400 Parnassus Ave, Room A-405, San Francisco, CA 94143-0320 (e-mail: eliseops{at}medicine.ucsf.edu).
Objectives. This study sought to compare smoking behavior among Latino men and women from different countries of origin. Methods. A telephone-administered survey was conducted in 8 cities with Latino men and women of different national origin living in census tracts with at least 70% Latino individuals. Results. A total of 8882 participants completed the survey; 53% were women. The average age of respondents was 44 years; 63% were foreign-born, and 59% preferred Spanish for the interview. Current smoking was more prevalent among men (25.0%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 23.7, 26.3) than among women (12.1%, 95% CI = 11.1, 13.0). Smoking rates were not significantly different by national origin among men, but Puerto Rican women had higher rates of smoking than other women. Central American men and women had the lowest smoking rates. Foreign-born respondents were less likely to be smokers (odds ratio [OR] = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.66, 0.90) than US-born respondents, and respondents with 12 years or less of education had an increased odds of smoking (OR = 1.17, 95% CI = 1.01, 1.35). High acculturation was associated with more smoking in women (OR = 1.12, 95% CI = 1.001.25) and less smoking in men (OR = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.780.95). Puerto Rican and Cuban respondents were more likely to be current smokers and to smoke more than 20 cigarettes per day. Conclusions. Older, US-born, and more-educated respondents were less likely to be current smokers. Respondents of Puerto Rican and Cuban origin were more likely to smoke. Acculturation has divergent effects on smoking behavior by sex.
Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the United States.1 National and regional surveys have found that, on average, Latinos smoke at lower rates compared with Whites and that among current smokers, Latinos average fewer cigarettes per day.24 Data from the 1997 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) show that the overall prevalence of cigarette smoking was lower for Latinos (20.4%, SD = 1.4) than for Whites (25.3%, SD = 0.7) and African Americans (26.7%, SD = 1.4) and not significantly different from that for Asian/Pacific Islanders (16.9%, SD = 2.7).5 The proportion of current smokers among Latino men (26.2%, SD = 2.1) was not significantly different from that among White men (27.4%, SD = 1.0) or Asian/Pacific Islander men (21.6%, SD = 4.4) and was lower than that among African American men (32.1%, SD = 2.4). The proportion of current smokers among Latino women (14.3%, SD = 2.1) was substantially lower than that among White women (23.3%, SD = 0.8) and African American women (22.4%, SD = 1.7) and was similar to that among Asian/Pacific Islander women (12.4%, SD = 3.5).5 Although the NHIS includes Latino respondents, analyses of rates by national origin are limited by the small sample size of groups other than Mexican Americans. The only national survey of Latinos that addressed smoking behavior and compared groups of different national background was the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HHANES), completed in 19821984.2 The Third National Health and Nutrition and Examination Survey (NHANES III), conducted in 19881994, oversampled Mexican Americans but did not include Latinos from other backgrounds.6 The level of acculturation, as measured by short language-based scales, is an important predictor of smoking behavior among US Latinos of Mexican and Central American origin.7,8 These data suggest that smoking behavior among Latinos becomes increasingly similar to that among Whites with increasing levels of acculturation; as a consequence, smoking may become a more serious problem for Latinos as their acculturation increases. Given current smoking trends among Latino youths and the observed effects of acculturation on smoking, there is appropriate concern that tobacco-related disease morbidity among Latinos may increase.9,10 Latino smokers report that they smoke an average of 8 cigarettes per day (women) and 12 cigarettes per day (men). These figures compare with an average of 19.1 and 23.4 cigarettes per day reported by White women and men, respectively.1 Although a smaller proportion of highly acculturated Latino men smoke, they report smoking a larger number of cigarettes per day than less-acculturated Latino men.7,11 Among Latino women, an increased level of acculturation is associated with a higher rate of smoking and, among smokers, with a larger number of cigarettes smoked per day. Latino smokers may underreport their daily consumption of cigarettes to some extent, but biochemical studies support the self-report data that Latinos smoke fewer cigarettes per day than Whites.1214 These observations have important implications for cessation strategies, because light smokers are more likely to quit smoking successfully with appropriate motivational messages and self-help methods.15 As part of the National Hispanic Leadership Initiative on Cancer: En Acción program, we conducted a survey of Latino adults to examine cigarette smoking behavior.16 Our objective was to evaluate smoking rates, smoking behavior, and the proportion of former smokers by national origin group and demographic predictors. This is the first study to compare smoking rates in a large sample of Latinos from 6 major national origin groups.
Sampling and Procedures Participants were surveyed by telephone from 8 areas that were selected to represent concentrated populations of Latinos from different national origin groups in the United States. Puerto Ricans were sampled from Brooklyn, NY; Cuban Americans from Miami, Fla; Mexican Americans from Houston, San Antonio, Laredo, and Brownsville, Tex, and San Diego, Calif; and Central Americans from San Francisco, Calif. Respondents who were not of the targeted Latino group in a specific city were included in the sample. To define the eligible population for the survey, we selected 95 census tracts with populations that were at least 70% Latino in the 1990 US census. We sampled 32 census tracts in Brooklyn, 8 in the Little Havana area in Miami, 7 in Houston, 7 in the western part of San Antonio, 8 in the south Texas border region, 7 in a colonia in the Brownsville area, 9 in Laredo, 19 in the Mission District of San Francisco, and 5 in the San Ysidro area in San Diego. The Office of Survey Research at the University of Texas at Austin conducted the telephone survey between November 1993 and April 1994. On the basis of geographic specification of census tracts and zip codes, lists of working residential numbers were purchased and randomly sampled by computer for administration by bilingual staff who were trained to use a computer-assisted telephone interview system. A household was considered to be eligible if the person answering the telephone self-identified as Latino or Hispanic on screening questions. Within a given household, the adult (18 years or older) who was eligible under the quota sampling requirement and had most recently celebrated a birthday (if more than 1 person met the qualifications) was invited to respond to the survey. Stratified quota sampling defined 4 groups by sex and age: men younger than 40 years and 40 years or older and women younger than 40 years and 40 years or older. The maximum number of respondents in each group within each city was 300. Selection of interviewees was determined by agreement to participate in the survey; when a cell was filled, no additional surveys were conducted in that specific stratum in that city. We selected the age and sex quotas to allow us to identify and compare different sectors of the Latino population across (and between) sites.
Questionnaire Bilingual and bicultural interviewers were selected to represent each of the 4 major Latino population groups surveyed. The interviewers underwent an average of 9 hours of training, and about 10% percent of their calls were validated. The Spanish-language survey took an average of 27 minutes to administer; the English version took an average of 24 minutes.
Data Analysis
A total of 8882 participants completed the survey. Of 10 700 potentially eligible participants identified during telephone screening, 385 (3.6%) actively refused to participate, and 1433 (13.4%) were not available to complete the interview. Thus, the collaboration rate was 83%. There were no significant differences in collaboration rate by geographic location or by Latino national group.
Table 1
The overall rate of current smoking was 25.0% (95% CI = 23.7, 26.3) for men and 12.1% (95% CI = 11.1, 13.0) for women (Table 2
Table 3
Most current smokers reported smoking fewer than 20 cigarettes per day. The average number of cigarettes smoked per day was 11.2 (SD = 11.8) for men and 8.9 (SD = 9.6) for women (Table 4
Of the 1950 former smokers (1313 men and 637 women), 75% of the men and 69% of the women had quit smoking more than 3 years before the survey was administered. Twelve percent of the men and 13.3% of the women had quit in the previous year and thus could be susceptible to relapse. Some former smokers (3.3% of the men and 1.7% of the women) claimed to have never smoked regularly.
We used multiple logistic regression analyses to predict current smoking separately by sex (Table 5
We used multivariate models to identify predictors of smokers' reporting 20 or more cigarettes per day; the results of this analysis are shown in Table 5
This study confirms results from previous national and regional surveys that indicate that smoking rates among Latino adults in these surveys generally are lower than those among Whites or African Americans, based on national data.1,4 This overall lower rate is in part a result of the lower proportion of Latino women who report smoking. The persistence of this observed smoking gap between the sexes has been consistent in most studies of Latino adults.13,23 Despite these encouraging observations, almost half of Latino women who have ever smoked remain current smokers; this ratio is higher than that among White women. Among former smokers, almost 90% of respondents had quit at least 1 year before the surveya strong predictor of continuous abstinence. This study is the first to compare rates among Latinos from the major national origin groups residing in the United States, and the similarities we found support the notion that smoking behavior is influenced by similar factors among Latinos of different backgrounds. Our survey found rates similar to those in the HHANES,2 which showed that Puerto Ricans and Cubans are more likely to smoke and to smoke more heavily than Mexican Americans. Even after adjusting the data for other factors, we found that Puerto Rican and Cuban respondents were significantly more likely to report current smoking, and current smokers were more likely to smoke 20 or more cigarettes per day, than were Mexican American smokers. The role of education as a predictor of smoking among Latinos has been examined in other studies and has been found to predict less smoking as education increases above high school.4,24 The fact that Latinos have lower educational attainment did not account for the lower rate of cigarette smoking in 2 California surveys.3,25 In an earlier survey of New Mexico Latinos, smoking status was influenced by educational attainment, with the anticipated decrease in smoking as education increased.26 In this study we found that in the overall sample, respondents with lower educational attainment (high school or less) were more likely to smoke cigarettes than those with more education; separate analyses by sex found only nonsignificant, though similar, trends. The association between greater educational attainment and decreased smoking is observed in more-developed countries.27 In the United States, overall smoking rates peak among persons who do not graduate from high school.1 In less-developed countries, such as in most of Latin America, smoking rates are highest among adults with more education, and economic factors lead to much lower smoking rates among persons with limited formal education.27 It appears that as US Latinos, especially women, increase their educational levels, they are less likely to smoke.4 These observations imply that cigarette smoking cessation interventions may have to be tailored by sex for Latinos, given the levels of education among smokers. In contrast to the confusing pattern that often emerges from the association of education and smoking, almost all surveys among Latino adults have found a lower rate of smoking among less-acculturated groups, especially when language acculturation scales have been used.1,2,7 These findings have been more striking among Latino women than among Latino men. In New Mexico, language preference did not affect smoking status, but in the California survey, respondents in Spanish were only about half as likely to be daily smokers.25,26 In our study, the association of acculturation and smoking had differential effects by sex. More-acculturated Latino men were significantly less likely to smoke cigarettes, whereas less-acculturated women were significantly less likely to smoke. Although the finding among women is consistent with findings from previous surveys, a differential effect by sex has been found less frequently.7 Latino men who were born in Latin America also were less likely to smoke (after adjustment for other predictors); we observed a nonsignificant trend in the same direction among women. Our findings are consistent with a recent analysis of cardiovascular risk factors among Mexican Americans that found increased risk factors in US-born Spanish-speaking persons.28 Latinos consistently report that they smoke fewer cigarettes per day than Whites and African Americans.1 Most surveys have been conducted with Latinos of Mexican background; the limited data available for Cubans and Puerto Ricans indicate that the average number of cigarettes smoked per day and the proportion of heavy smokers are considerably higher than in Latino groups of other national origin, especially among men.1,2 Our data support these observations: Only about one-quarter of Latino smokers reported smoking a pack or more of cigarettes per day. However, we found that Cubans and Puerto Ricans smoked more cigarettes per day than Mexicans and Central Americans. In fact, the number of cigarettes smoked per day by Latinos is so low as to lead us to question the extent of dependence. The question of whether there are biological differences in the metabolism of nicotine or the susceptibility to addiction that may affect intake of nicotine among Latinos has not been studied. Although studies have shown that serum cotinine levels are consistent with the self-reported number of cigarettes among Mexican American smokers,14,29 concerns have been raised that there is a higher rate of misclassification of smoking status among minority populations compared with Whites.30 In this study, we observed that a small proportion of respondents reported smoking fewer than 1 cigarette per day, even though they responded affirmatively to the question "Do you smoke cigarettes now?" This group of intermittent smokers is proportionally larger than what had been reported in national surveys; the range in those surveys was 2% to 3%.31 Data from the California survey and the 1991 NHIS indicate that among persons who report smoking some of the time, Latinos are more likely than Whites to be defined as never-daily smokers.32,33 In fact, the proportion of never-daily smokers among Latinos in the 1991 NHIS was 17.4%, compared with 3.8% among Whites and 10.8% among African Americans.33 Analyses from the NHANES III reported that 24.3% of Mexican American smokers consumed only 1 to 4 cigarettes in the previous 5 days, compared with 5.5% of White and 6.2% of Black smokers; thus, more than one-quarter of Mexican American smokers had serum cotinine levels that were consistent with nonsmoking.14 Occasional smokers presumably are at greater risk of progressing to daily smoking and developing nicotine dependence, but the risk of major significant adverse health outcomes related to occasional smoking is limited. Observation of lower smoking-related morbidity and mortality among Latinos may be related to the higher proportion of occasional smokers, further decreasing the contribution of smoking as a risk factor. Our study has several important limitations. First, the sample was selected from high-concentration census tracts in 8 cities and thus the findings are not fully generalizable to all US Latinos. Second, we calculated smoking rates exclusively on the basis of self-reports, and there is evidence that misclassification of smokers as nonsmokers may occur at a higher rate among non-White persons.30 However, the higher proportion of occasional smokers who may not even achieve levels of cotinine consistent with active smoking may have inflated prevalence rates somewhat. Third, we conducted a short telephone survey that covered a broad array of preventive behaviors that are relevant to cancer; we were not able to ask additional questions about quitting behavior, attitudes toward smoking, and other predictor variables. Our study is the first survey that compares smoking behavior among 6 Latino groups in the United States. Although there are similar prevalence patterns, Puerto Rican respondents stand out as having the highest ratesincluding a notable narrowing of the differences between the sexes. These data provide evidence that being born in Latin America appears to protect Latinos from smoking, which is consistent with the observation that increased acculturation to the United States leads to a less healthy lifestyle. Level of educational attainment affected smoking behavior in women only. National data on smoking behavior in US Latino men and women will be useful in developing broad smoking cessation interventions that are tailored to specific national groups, are implemented in Spanish, and consider educational differences to maximize their effectiveness.
The study was supported by the National Hispanic Leadership Initiative on Cancer: En Acción under a grant from the National Cancer Institute (cooperative agreement UO1 CA9379) awarded to the South Texas Health Research Center, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (A. Ramirez, principal investigator); a grant from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (grant AHCPR HS07373); and a grant from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research, and the Office of Research on Minority Health (grant P30 AG15272) awarded to the University of California, San Francisco. Respondents provided verbal consent at the time of telephone contact. Institutional review boards from each of the collaborating sites approved the interview protocol. Ginny Gildengorin provided valuable assistance in data analysis.
E. J. Pérez-Stable participated in planning and designing the study, contributed to the design of the questionnaire, directed the analysis, and wrote most of the paper. A. Ramirez was the principal planner of the study and contributed to the design of the questionnaire and the writing of the paper. R. Villareal participated in planning the study, was the principal planner of the sampling approach, and contributed to the design of the questionnaire, to the analyses, and to the writing of the paper. G. A. Talvera, E. Trapido, L. Suarez, J. Marti, and A. McAlister participated in planning and designing the study and contributed to the design of the questionnaire and the writing of the paper. Accepted for publication October 10, 2000.
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