A cross-sectional study on the association between smoking behavior and GERD prevalence among the Bangladeshi university students

Abstract

Objective: To know the association between smoking behavior and GERD prevalence, this study was conducted among the public and private university students in Bangladesh. The main purpose of the study was to determine if GERD and smoking are related after analyzing the impact of factors like age, gender, university type, and smoking habit. Subject and Method: The study included 405 participants and conducted in the period of December 2024 to June 2025. The students who participated were aged above 26 from different public and private universities in Bangladesh. For data collection, a self-administered questionnaire was used. IBM SPSS was used, and Microsoft Excel was used for data analysis. Analysis and Result: Collected data was analyzed by descriptive statistics and Pearson chi-square test. The majority students were found to have as low to moderate GERD risk while only a few were classified as high risk of GERD. Here, the assessment included smoking status, cigarette consumption, and vaping habit. According to the analyzed result, there was no significant association between smoking behavior and GERD. There were some motivational factors that led the students to smoking behavior. Among these stress, peer pressure, academic pressure, curiosity, family problem and others were common but stress was shown as the prime factor of smoking behavior. Conclusion: This cross-sectional study found that there was no significant relationship between smoking behavior and GERD prevalence among the university students of Bangladesh. There were some limitations that influenced the result of this study. Firstly, it was a cross-sectional study that might limit the ability to establish causality as well as the data were self-reported which effected the result. Moreover, some other factors like restricted sample collection, narrow age group mostly influenced the result of this study. Future research might be more effective to find relationship between smoking behavior and GERD prevalence if their opportunity to collect data widely, a wider age range, examination of other lifestyle, habits and stress that could affect the result directly.