Introduction: Nicotine addiction is one of the major issue in public health especially in Malaysia. Nicotine addiction also make a quitting smoking process difficult for most smokers and could cause relapse and failure. This study inves-tigated relationship between nicotine addiction and psychosocial factors such as anxiety, depression and social sup-port among smokers registered in quit smoking clinic services in the hospital around Klang Valley, Malaysia. Meth-ods: A cross-sectional study has been conducted among 115 smokers. Results: Results showed that 23.5% smokers had high nicotine addiction, 24.3% had moderate nicotine addiction, and the rest had low nicotine addiction. There is a positive significant relationship between nicotine addiction with age and smoking duration (r=0.34, p< 0.01 and r=0.41, p< 0.01, respectively). There is also a positive significant relationship between nicotine addiction with anxi-ety and depression (r=0.33, p< 0.01 and r=0.38, p< 0.01, respectively). In addition, there is a negative significant re-lationship between nicotine addiction with social support overall and social support from significant others (r= -0.22, p< 0.05 and r= -0.19, p< 0.05, respectively). The study shows that psychosocial factors such as anxiety, depression, social support and socio-demographic factors such as age and smoking duration were potentially affecting smoker ́s nicotine addiction. Conclusions: Besides pharmacological treatment, this study proves the importance of psycho-social factors involvement in helping client with nicotine addiction issues. Therefore, psycho-education, behaviour modification and psychosocial support skills should be enhanced for the quit smoking clinic handler. Studies on the need for psychosocial factors in helping smokers reduce their psychological and behaviours dependence on nicotine addiction should also be explored in greater depth.
Taking care of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) could be a demanding task for parents. Consequently, parents of children with ASD may experience parenting stress and depression symptoms. This study examined parenting stress and depression symptoms among parents of children and adolescents with ASD. This study also examined the role of child characteristics (e.g., age, child quality of life and problem behavior) on parenting stress and depression symptoms and the effect of parenting stress on parental depression. A total of 78 parents were examined using a questionnaire survey. The result indicated that parents caring a younger age group of children with ASD have higher levels of depression symptoms compared to parents caring for older group of children with ASD. The result also revealed a significant difference in level of depression symptoms between parents with higher levels of parenting stress and parents with lower parenting stress. Only the children age significantly predicts depression symptoms in parents of children with ASD. This indicates that children age is potential to affect mental health among parents of children with ASD.