Exploring Relationship Between Urgent Healthcare Visits on Daily Smoking Intensity: Cross-sectional Study Using Zero-inflated Models

This research aims to investigate how visits to urgent care facilities affect the daily cigarette consumption of smokers. Understanding these relationships is crucial for developing public health policies and interventions to reduce smoking rates and lessen the strain on healthcare systems.This study draws on data from the 2023 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to investigate the relationship between daily cigarette consumption and urgent healthcare visits. A sample of 28,122adult respondents was analyzed using Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) and Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) models to account for overdispersion and the count nature of the data. Covariates included age, sex, cardiovascular disease (CHC), education level, and health insurance coverage.The ZINB model showed that individuals with five or more urgent care visits annually were more likely to reduce cigarette consumption, with a reduction of 0.35.