Changes in vaping-related knowledge following the delivery of an educational intervention to university students in Mexico: a prospective follow-up study.

چکیده اصلی

OBJECTIVE: Assess changes in the vaping-related knowledge of Mexican university students following participation in a structured educational session. DESIGN: A prospective, longitudinal, one-group non-randomised, pre-test-post-test study with a 3-month follow-up. SETTING: The study was conducted between December 2023 and January 2025 at two private, teaching-oriented and professional-training-oriented universities in the Mexican states of Nuevo León and Durango. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 304 undergraduate students completed the baseline and immediate postintervention participation assessments and 181 participants (59.5%) completed the 3-month follow-up assessment. INTERVENTION: Participants attended a standardised educational session that communicated information about nicotine addiction, vaping-related health risks and the proper environmental disposal of electronic cigarettes. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was the sum of correct responses to eight scored knowledge items (raw range 0-8; one point per correct response). Secondary outcomes included changes in individual knowledge items. All inferential analyses used the raw 0-8 score; conversion to a 0-100 percentage-correct scale was used only for descriptive interpretation. Paired t tests, McNemar tests, 95% CIs and Cohen's d effect sizes were used. RESULTS: Our findings show that knowledge improved across most scored knowledge items immediately after participation in the intervention and remained higher than baseline after 3 months. Specifically, mean knowledge scores increased from 4.82±1.70 at baseline to 6.53±1.64 immediately after participation in the intervention (mean difference 1.71, 95% CI 1.43 to 1.99; p<0.001; Cohen's d=1.02) and 6.62±1.67 at follow-up (mean difference from baseline 1.85, 95% CI 1.50 to 2.20; p<0.001; Cohen's d=1.09). No significant difference was observed between immediately postintervention and follow-up assessments (p=0.384). Attrition analyses identified no significant differences in baseline knowledge (p=0.602) or sex (p=0.321) between retained participants and those lost to follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Participation in a structured educational intervention was associated with significant and sustained improvements in vaping-related knowledge among participating university students. The study did not assess whether these knowledge gains translated into changes in vaping initiation, cessation or use; this requires evaluation in controlled studies with behavioural outcomes.

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