News

Plymouth: Breaking smoking chain

Young smokers are being targeted as part of a bid to stop people lighting up in the city.
A meeting was held by the Plymouth Smokefree Alliance to discuss ways to stub out the problem of cigarettes.
This follows the news that across Plymouth a higher than average number of adults smoke, with 27 per cent reaching for cigarettes, compared to 21 per cent nationally.
"We are looking at three themes: motivating smokers to assist them with quitting, protecting communities and families and stopping the inflow of young people recruited as smokers," said Jane Bullard, tobacco control lead at Plymouth NHS Stop Smoking Service.
"I think one of the reasons young people smoke is because often they copy parents and in certain communities everyone smokes," she said.

The aims, which were discussed by members of Plymouth City Council, the police, youth service, fire service and NHS are part of a wider national strategy to slash the number of people smoking.
"What we would like is for people growing up nowadays to never even try smoking," said Jane.
"And I would love it if in 30 years time they would say: what is a cigarette?"
The meeting comes just a few days ahead of No Smoking Day which is being held on March 10.
The national event is an ideal opportunity for smokers to throw away their cigarettes and get help to quit.
The NHS Stop Smoking Service, which launched this year's event with the help of the Plymouth Raiders, works with would-be quitters to let them know about the support available to them.

Source: thisisplymouth, 04 March 2010

Teens drawn by cigarette adverts

Researchers have found in a new study that cigarette ads are extremely fine-tuned to capture the attention of teens. A direct correlation was established between the number of tobacco-related ads teens see, and the chances of them actually taking a puff from a cigarette. Experts say that the main reason why these advertisements are so effective is the fact that they promote a wide array of vivid images, which resonate with teens. In fact, cigarette ads are very well designed to capture all ages, genders and ethnicities, scientists say. Each subgroup of the population is targeted by one or more brands of type of cigarettes.
"Cigarettes have created a brand for every personality trait. If you are looking to project independence and masculinity, think of the lonely cowboy in the Marlboro ads. On the other hand, if you're looking to project a desire for romantic relationships, and friendships are playing a role, then you will choose Lucky Strike if you are a man and Virginia Slims if you are a woman," says the director of the Kiel, Germany-based Institute for Therapy and Health Research, Reiner Hanewinkel, PhD. The expert, who is also the lead author of the new study, collaborated with colleagues from the Dartmouth Medical Center for this investigation.
In a paper already available online, and also scheduled for publication in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the experts explain that children who were determined to be watching many cigarette ads were twice more likely than their peers to be interested in these products. Additionally, they were also found to be about three times more likely to have smoked in the past month than kids their age who did not watch these ads. But the worrying conclusion of the study is that children who get a lot of exposure to cigarette ads say that they will pick up smoking more often than others. This means that they form an opinion on the habit even before they pick it up, experts say.
"We were amazed at how often they had seen the images and could correctly recall the cigarette brand. For example, 55 percent had seen the Lucky Strike image and almost one quarter correctly decoded the brand," says Dartmouth pediatrics professor James Sargent, MD, a collaborator on the research. "This is a well-done study. They controlled for all the things they needed to control for. It's a nice contribution to the literature showing that cigarette advertising is very powerful," says of the new work the director of the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education, Stanton Glantz, PhD.

Source: Softpedia Health, 03 March 2010

Smoking cessation boost in young and socially deprived

The number of people who gave up smoking in the UK increased significantly between April 2001 and April 2007, according to a cross-sectional study published in the British Journal of General Practice.

The study of 525 general practices identified an overall increase in the provision of smoking cessation advice and referral to stop-smoking services over a six-year period. The proportion of people who smoked reduced by 6%. The decrease was greatest in the most deprived areas and among the youngest patients.
Although there was an overall improvement in smoking cessation, comparatively high rates of smoking were identified among younger adults and those who are socioeconomically deprived. In 2006-07 more than twice as many patients in deprived areas smoked as those in affluent areas.
The authors recommended that more resources are focused on efforts to target the prevention of smoking uptake in children and adolescents and providing more resources for smoking cessation services aimed at younger and socioeconomically-deprived adults

Source: Nursing Times, 03 March 2010

Secondhand smoke damages arteries in teens: study

Children as young as 13 who have evidence of secondhand smoke in their blood also have visibly thicker arteries, Finnish researchers reported.
Their study suggests that the damage caused by secondhand tobacco smoke starts in childhood and causes measurable damage by the teen years.
"Although previous research has found that passive smoke may be harmful for blood vessels among adults, we did not know until this study that these specific effects also happen among children and adolescents," Dr. Katariina Kallio of the University of Turku in Finland, who led the study, said in a statement.
Her team studied 494 children aged 8 to 13 taking part in ongoing research on heart disease. They measured levels of cotinine, a byproduct of nicotine that is found in the blood after someone breathes in tobacco smoke.
They divided the children into groups with high, intermediate and low cotinine levels. Ultrasound was used to measure the thickness of the aorta and of the carotid artery in the neck.
Artery walls look thicker on an ultrasound if they are damaged by the process of atherosclerosis.
The children with the most cotinine in their blood had carotid artery walls that were, on average, 7 percent thicker than the children with the lowest cotinine levels, Kallio's team reported in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Their aortas were 8 percent thicker.
The researchers also did a test that measures the flexibility of the arteries in the arm, another measure of blood vessel health and heart disease risk.
This measurement, called brachial artery flow-mediated dilation, was 15 percent lower in teenagers with the highest levels of cotinine, they found.
And measures of cholesterol showed unhealthier levels among the children with more smoke in their blood.
"These findings suggest that children should not face exposure to tobacco smoke at all," Kallio said. "Even a little exposure to tobacco smoke may be harmful for blood vessels."
In October, the U.S. Institute of Medicine reported that indoor smoking bans lower the risk of heart attack even among nonsmokers by reducing exposure to secondhand smoke.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Heart Association say secondhand smoke kills an estimated 46,000 Americans from heart disease every year.
The World Lung Foundation and the American Cancer Society jointly project that tobacco use will kill 6 million people next year from cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other ills, with direct medical costs to the global economy of $500 billion a year.

Source: Reuters News, 03 March 2010