Cigarette smoking, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus [DM] are known major risk factors for coronary heart disease. Knowledge and awareness of school teachers about these problems is important for the sake of educating their students to adopt healthy behaviors.
The aim of the present study was to assess the level of knowledge of male school teachers about three common health problems [smoking, hypertension and DM] in Al-Khobar and Dammam cities, Saudi Arabia, and to determine the prevalence of smoking among the school teachers. A cross-sectional study was conducted among male school teachers from the three school levels. A multistage random sample with proportional allocation was used to select 25 schools. A total sample of 786 school teachers was selected [393 primary, 146 intermediate and 247 secondary school teachers]. Data were collected using a self-administered questionnaire. The majority of the school teachers were Saudis [91.7%], 59.4% were below 30 years of age, and 93.8% were university graduates. Only 38.3% and 56.9% of school teachers correctly mentioned that all types of smoking were equally dangerous to health and passive smoking had negative effect on smokers' children school performance, respectively. The prevalence of current smoking was 22.5% among school teachers. The majority of school teachers believed that hypertension was a serious medical problem. However, more than half of the teachers had the misconception that hypertension causes insomnia, indigestion and particularly headache [79.9%, 71.7% and 54.7%, respectively]. The majority of school teachers had good knowledge about causes of DM but still some of them [26.8%] had some misconceptions. The majority of school teachers had fair level of knowledge [83.8%] and 8.8% had poor level of knowledge about the three common health problems. There is a need for educating school teachers and raising their knowledge and awareness about smoking, hypertension and DM. This will help them in actively participating in the implementation of effective intervention programs for improving the health and quality of life of school-age children and adolescents with these three common health problems.