Parental tobacco use and restrictions influence teen smoking

It has long been recognized that the kids of parents who smoke are more likely to become smokers themselves. Some studies have found that if both parents smoke, their kids are about 4 times more likely to become smokers (as compared with kids of 2 never smokers). If parents smoke, the earlier they quit, the less likely their kids are to become smokers.

More recently researchers have examined the impact of parental smoking restrictions and adolescent smoking. One such study was published this month by a group led by Dr Joseph Ditre of the University of South Florida in Tampa. They asked 757 Florida high schoolers about their tobacco use and attitudes and restrictions on smoking imposed by their parents. The first interesting finding was that 44% of adolescent smokers reported that their parents do not know they smoke!

The other main finding was that the greater the parental restrictions on smoking (e.g. banning tobacco from the home) the less smoking the less their kids smoked, and the more motivated the kids were to quit. In fact smoking kids of parents who never restrict smoking, smoke about twice as many cigarettes (15) as smoking kids of parents who restrict smoking a lot (7).

So although there are other factors influencing adolescent smoking (like peer smoking), parental smoking and attitudes still have an influence. So if you are a smoker and you don’t want your kids to smoke, the sooner you quit smoking and implement tight smoking restrictions for the home the better.

A summary of the paper by Ditre and colleagues can be found at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18584461?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Labels: adolescent, cigarette smoking, parent, tobacco, youth

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Which kids in the US are most likely to use tobacco?

The tobacco industry has a problem. Its products kill the consumers when used as intended. Given the high rate of people ceasing tobacco use due to premature death or success in beating the addiction, the industry has its work cut out in replacing these consumers with new users. Each company is aware that smokers quickly develop brand loyalty, and so the race is on to hook kids before other companies can get their hands on them. Youth are also a major target for tobacco companies because the younger they get them, the more years of tobacco sales will be achieved before the consumer dies.

In the United States, tobacco use by high school kids is defined as either current use (any use in past 30 days) or frequent use (use on 20 out of the last 30 days). The proportion of high school kids who were current (frequent) cigarette smokers in the US increased from 1991 when it was 27.5% (12.5%) to peak in 1997 at 36.4% (16.7%), before falling to 23% (9.7%) in 2005. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the increase in youth cigarette smoking throughout the 1990s was reversed from the same year the Master Settlement Agreement was signed (law suit in which states sued tobacco companies for tobacco-caused Medicaid costs). The MSA triggered significant publicity about the harmfulness of tobacco, resulted in a marked increase in tobacco control funding, and also resulted in price increases (which was how the companies easily recouped the money they paid in the settlement).

In 2005 white (non-Hispanic) girls had the highest current cigarette use (27%), followed by white boys (24.9%) and Hispanic boys (24.8%). These rates are much higher than among African American high school kids, of whom only 11.8% of girls and 14% of boys were cigarette smokers.

African American youth have consistently had much lower smoking rates than white youth over the past 25 years, although in the early 1970 their smoking rates were similar to whites. No-one knows what caused such a marked decline in African American youth smoking from the early 70s through to the 1980s and beyond. If you have any idea I’d like to hear it (and note that African American youth were also less likely to use alcohol or illicit drugs than white youth during that same time period).

You can read a full report on the latest data on youth cigarette smoking in the US at:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5526a2.htm

Labels: cigarette smoking, jonathan foulds, USA, youth

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Reductions in teen smoking.

One of the most fascinating and unexplained changes in smoking habits that has taken place in the United States was the dramatic reduction of cigarette smoking among African American youth since the 1970s. The “Monitoring the Future” study has documented clearly that in 1975, smoking prevalence was very similar across ethnic/racial groups of teenagers, with 38% of white teens smoking, 37% of African American teens smoking and 36% of Latino youth smoking cigarettes in 1977. However, by 1985, smoking prevalence had halved among African American teens (18%) but remained high in whites (31%) and Latino youth (26%). By 1992 the differences had become even more marked, with only 9% of African American youth smoking, compared with 32% of white youth and 25% of Latino youth. Although smoking declined in young people of all backgrounds since 1998, these ethnic/racial differences largely persist. So the proportion of African American teens who smoke was cut by more than three quarters over 15 years, and yet no-one appears to know how it happened. Suggestions have ranged from increased price-responsiveness among African American teens (during a period involving increases in price of cigarettes), the possibility that African American youth could be using other substances instead. However, this last idea is based more on stereotypes than data: illegal drug use has also fallen in African American youth over the same time frame, and in 2006 a smaller proportion of African American high school seniors had used an illicit substance in the past year, as compared with whites or Latinos.

So this rather dramatic reduction in smoking by African American youth occurred prior to the major funded campaigns that followed the master Settlement Agreement in 1998, and is largely unexplained. If you think you have an explanation, please tell me!

Labels: ethnicity, nicotine addiction cigarette, race, Smoking, teen, tobacco, youth

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