Smoking, drinking, sleeping and risky sexual behaviors: a cross sectional study in China (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND General lifestyle health behaviors (e.g., drinking, smoking) and risky health behaviors are important causes of death, and often have concomitant and aggregative characteristics. However, the associations between general lifestyle health behaviors and risky sexual behaviors are unclear. OBJECTIVE We aim to identify the associations between risky sexual behaviors and general lifestyle health behaviors. METHODS We employed a self-designed structured questionnaire to collect data in January 2022 through Credamo. The questionnaire mainly included the following three parts: the social-demographic characteristics, general lifestyle health behaviors and risky sexual behaviors. To control the confounding factors, propensity score matching (PSM) was used to match the people with or without risky sexual behaviors. Moreover, binary logistic regression was used to analyze the influencing factors of people with or without risky sexual behaviors. RESULTS In total, 3420 participants were incorporated in the data analysis. The matched data showed no significant differences between people with risky sexual behaviors and without in gender, age, marital status, nationality, religion, household registration, educational level and annual income (P>0.05). The prevalence of smoking(50.9% vs 26.8%), drinking(39.9% vs 25.6%), insomnia (25.9% vs 15.6%) was all higher among people with risky sexual behaviors than those without sexual behaviors. The rate of smoking everyday was 31.3% among people with risky sexual behaviors and 10.1% among those without risky sexual behaviors. The percentage of excessive drinking among people with risky sexual behaviors (30.5%) was significantly higher than that among people without risky sexual behaviors (17.1%). About time to fall asleep, the proportion of people who had risky sexual behaviors fall asleep after 12 o'clock was also higher(31.6% vs 20.5%) than their counterparts. Binary logistic regression showed that whether smoking, drinking alcohol, and insomnia were significant influencing factors for having risky sexual behaviors(P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS Smoking, alcohol consumption and sleeping problems were associated with risky sexual behaviors. Interventions regarding smoking cessation, moderate drinking and early to bed are important, which may be linked with reduced risky sexual behaviors.