Smoking and the level of nicotine addiction in relation to the state of hard dental tissues in young adults.

Nowadays, smoking is considered to be one of the unhealthiest human behaviours. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential influence of smoking, as well as the degree of the addiction, on the health status of hard dental tissues in young adults. The study involved 148 randomly selected young adults. Mean age of the study subjects was 20 years ± 4 months. Questionnaire survey (6-grade Fagerstrom Nicotine Tolerance Questionnaire) and clinical examination were performed and the obtained results statistically analyzed. The mean value of 6-grade Fagerstrom Nicotine Tolerance Questionnaire was 2.298 ± 1.992. Of the studied population, 88.06% had no features of biological dependency. Mean DMF and DMFs Indexes were 11.31 ± 5.06 and 16.91 ± 10.65, respectively. It was established that in the study population, over 45% of the subjects smoked. However, there was no correlation found between smoking and gender, and no cause-eff ect relationship between smoking and hard dental tissues status as defined by DMF, DMFs values and their components. It was observed that in the case of people who began smoking at an earlier age, the degree of nicotine dependency was higher. None of the study subjects demonstrated features of heavy or pharmacological nicotine dependency.