Objective: Despite all the intervention efforts in the fight against smoking; smoking rates have increased, especially among young people. It is possible to reduce this increase by informing the youth correctly and raising awareness about tobacco and tobacco products. For this reason, a project has been implemented in order to gather information about smoking behaviors among university students and to raise awareness about nicotine addiction.

Material and Method: Online training on "cigarette/ nicotine addiction" was given to students in fifteen different academic units in March 2022. After the training, the 27-question survey was answered by the participants. In the questionnaire, information about the level of knowledge, attitudes/behaviors, approaches, and smoking status of the students about tobacco and tobacco products such as cigarettes, hookahs, and electronic cigarettes were recorded.

Results: The mean age of 191 students who answered the questionnaire was 21 and 57% were women. The rate of student who smokes was 33.5% (22% of students are "constantly", 11.5% are "occasionally" smokers). Hookah

was the second most widely used tobacco product (18.8%). While the rate of using any tobacco product was 29.4% for female students, 51.2% for male students (p=0.002), and 38.7% in total. It was determined that the smoking of a sibling (p=0.025) or a close friend(p=0.001) increased the probability of the student smoking. The complaints of cough and shortness of breath were found to be twice as high in smokers (40.5%) compared to non-smokers (21.4%) (p=0.014). The rate exposed to secondhand smoke in students of the university was found to be 58%. Even in non-smoker students, the secondhand smoke rate was quite high (47%). Our data showed that students have a high desire to quit smoking, there were many previous attempts to quit but the attempts were unsuccessful.

Conclusion: Serious levels of nicotine addiction and passive smoking exposure were found in students. The presence of symptoms such as coughing and shortness of breath indicates a negative effect. It is important that half of the students who smoke have requested “medical support to quit smoking” University students are a good target group in terms of combating smoking and there is a need to increase the struggle in this regard in order for our future to be composed of healthy individuals.

University students Tobacco Hookah Secondhand smoke