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Military service and smoking in a cohort of northern Vietnamese older adults

  • Original article
  • Published:
International Journal of Public Health

Abstract

Objectives

Wide-ranging scholarship demonstrates war’s impacts on US veterans’ health. We ask whether, among Vietnamese men of a certain age, wartime experiences contributed to initiating smoking, and thus shaped one behavioral pathway linking war exposure and older adult health.

Methods

We analyze the Vietnam Health and Aging Pilot Study (VHAPS), a survey of adults ages 55 and older (N = 405) conducted in one commune of northern Vietnam. We implement Cox discrete-time proportional hazards models to discern the effects of military service upon the initiation of smoking.

Results

Military service results in a heightened risk of initiating smoking within this cohort (HR 2.13, [CI 1.36, 3.35]). Smoking initiation is also significantly gendered and age graded. Socioeconomic position and social capital variables in the models are statistically insignificant.

Conclusions

This study finds that, among older northern Vietnamese men whose early adulthood coincided with mass mobilization in the Vietnam War, involvement in formal military service significantly increased the risk of initiating smoking. Military-induced smoking emerges where tobacco products were not provided by the military institution, but where social availability of tobacco was widespread.

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Acknowledgments

The VLS Health and Aging Pilot Study that provided the data for the present article was supported by grants from the University of Utah’s Funding Incentive Seed Grant Program and Singapore Management University’s Office of Research (C242/MSS9S010). We thank Nguyen Huu Minh and the staff of the Institute of Family and Gender Studies for their assistance in collecting and managing the VHAPS survey data. Kim Korinek received generous support as a visiting senior research fellow from the Asia Research Institute and the Centre for Family and Population Research, National University of Singapore, while completing revisions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Utah, 380 S. 1530 E., Room 301, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, USA

    Kim Korinek & Ha Ngoc Trinh

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Weber State University, Social Science Building, Room 114, Ogden, UT, USA

    Peter Loebach

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  1. Kim Korinek
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  2. Peter Loebach
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  3. Ha Ngoc Trinh
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Correspondence to Kim Korinek.

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Korinek, K., Loebach, P. & Trinh, H.N. Military service and smoking in a cohort of northern Vietnamese older adults. Int J Public Health 62, 43–51 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-016-0841-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-016-0841-9

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