Association between panic attacks and cigarette smoking among psychiatric patients

Background and aim: Panic attacks are a period of intense fear that temporarily disrupts a normal person's activities. There are many factors which can influence them, one of which is cigarette smoking. This project was conducted with the aim of investigating the association between panic attacks and smoking. Methods and materials: This is a case-control study that was conducted to determine the impact of panic attacks and smoking in patients referred to the psychiatric clinic of Imam Hossein Hospital in Shahroud in 2017. Eligible patients were selected by the simple census method to complete the sample size, based on having or not having a history of panic attacks. They were divided into case and control groups and history of smoking in the past was studied. Results: In this study, 114 (39.9%) patients were male and the rest were female. The mean age of the patients was 32.68 +/- 11.16 years. In terms of smoking, 100 (69.9%) were in the case group and 52 (36.4%) were in the control group, which was significant (p = 0.001) in the case group. Also, the results of the logistic regression model showed that smoking could significantly increase the incidence of panic attacks; therefore, smoking increases the odds ratio (OR = 2.83) of panic attacks. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that smoking can increase the risk of panic attacks and increase its OR by about 3-fold, but more definitive research is needed to confirm this finding.