Abstract:
Background: Recently, khat chewing becomes a common practice among high school, College and
University students. Student uses khat to be alert and wakeful at night; especially during examination
periods. Regular khat chewing is thought to be a predisposing factor for different physical and mental
illnesses. Different studies reported inconsistent finding on the prevalence of Khat chewing and only few
of them tried to investigate its withdrawal symptoms. Even in Ethiopia there was no accessible study
investigated khat withdrawal symptoms. This study added a value to narrow the inconsistent finding on
the prevalence of khat chewing and brought new finding within from the country about khat withdrawal
symptoms. Again this study can be used to guide decision for the public health policy, prevention and
planning to bring change in contributing factors for Khat chewing.
Objectives: To determine the prevalence, withdrawal symptoms and associated factors of khat chewing,
among Jimma university regular undergraduate students, Jimma, southwest Ethiopia, 2015/2016.
Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study design was conducted. The data were collected using
structured self-administered questionnaire. The collected Data were entered in to Epidata 3.1 and exported
to SPSS version 20 for windows. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions were used to explore
associations and identify independently associated variables with khat chewing. The analysis took
confidence interval of 95% and association with p-value of <0.05.
Results: This study revealed that the life time and current prevalence of khat chewing among students
were 26.3% (n=163) and 23.9% (n=148) respectively. Majority of current chewers (68.2%, n=101)
reported different withdrawal symptoms. The predominant factors associated with khat chewing were
being male, never attending a place of worship, living non-dormitory in rented home, having family
members currently chewing khat and using ganja/cannabis.
Conclusions: In this study result significant numbers of university students were chewing khat currently.
In this study the independent variables which have statistically significance with dependent variable were:
gender, never attending a place of worship, current living condition, current using ganja/cannabis and
having family members currently chewing khat. The main reasons given for starting khat chewing were
for study purpose and socialization purpose. The most frequently reported withdrawal symptoms were
feeling depressed, craving and feeling fatigue.
