The more cigarette advertisements they are exposed to, the more likely kids are to take up the habit.
At least that was the conclusion of a new study of German non-smokers between the ages of 10 and 17. It found that those who were exposed to cigarette ads were 46 percent more likely to start smoking than those who weren’t. In addition, the likelihood of initiating a smoking habit increased with more exposure to advertising.
The American and German researchers conducting the study, which was published in the medical journal Pediatrics, tracked the changes in the behavior of children who were exposed to six different cigarette commercials for nine months, and compared the results to children who were made to watch ads for other products. At the end of the period, 13 percent of those in the tobacco-ad group had begun to smoke.
The 13 percent figure reflected an average among groups exposed to varying amounts of cigarette advertising. The percentage of young people who took up smoking ranged from 10 percent, among those exposed to the least amount of cigarette advertising, up to 19 percent, among those exposed to the most cigarette advertising.
“This is very important because there are few, if any, longitudinal studies” that connect tobacco advertising and teen smoking, Cheryl Healton, president of the anti-smoking group American Legacy Foundation, told Bloomberg Businessweek.
Longitudinal studies track subjects over an extended period of time, while cross-sectional studies, which are more common, focus only on a single moment.
The research on tobacco ads was unveiled as two other studies were released on the harm caused by smoking. In one study, published in Chemical Research in Toxicology, researchers from the University of Minnesota concluded that the levels of cancer-causing chemicals begin to jump within minutes of a person smoking his or her first cigarette.
“The chilling thing about this research is that it shows just how early the very first stages of that process begin — not in 30 years but within 30 minutes of a single cigarette for every subject in the study,” Martin Dockrell, director of policy and research at the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health, told the BBC.
Another smoking study, by researchers in Scotland and England, focused on the life-expectancy disparity between men and women in 30 European countries. As the BBC reports, it found that up to 60 percent of the gap is due to more frequent smoking among males. In most countries, women live several years longer than their male countrymen.
