A Pilot Study on the Association between Smoking Behavior of Older Patients with Hypertension and Environmental Factors of Their Residential Area

Smoking cessation should be essential for health management of patients with high blood pressure, but some patients continue to smoke. Although previous studies on smoking cessation in the patients have mainly focused on personal factors, this study focused on environmental factors of the residential area as a preliminary study. For this purpose, the analysis data used in this study were data for 32,119 hypertensive patients aged 55 years or older from the 2019 Community Health Survey data of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The data consisted of the respondent’s gender, age, smoking behavior, and five environmental factors of the residential area (safety level, natural environment, living environment, public transportation, and medical service conditions) as dependent measures. Data analysis results revealed that the smoking behavior of the patients was somewhat related to environmental factors in their residential area. In particular, the overall safety level of the residential area and satisfaction with public transportation conditions were revealed to be factors explaining the behavior of the patients. However, the discussion pointed out some methodological problems of the survey tool and raised the need to examine more precisely the association between the community environment and the smoking behavior. This study is significant in that it examined the association between smoking problems in the older patients with hypertension and environmental factors of their residential area.