Tobacco & Marijuana
Health risk behaviors associated with lower prostate specific antigen awareness
According to a study conducted at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, health risk behaviors such as smoking and obesity are associated with lower awareness of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA), which could lead to a lower likelihood of undergoing actual prostate cancer screening. Although previous studies have explored predictors of PSA test awareness, this is the first research to focus on health risk behaviors, such as smoking, physical inactivity, obesity, and excessive alcohol consumption. The study findings were reported in the August issue of The Journal of Urology.
Awareness of PSA testing is considered an important cognitive precursor of prostate cancer screening and it was found to contribute to differences in prostate cancer screening rates. Earlier studies have suggested that persons who seek out cancer information are more likely to acquire knowledge, demonstrate healthy behaviors, and undergo cancer screening. According to the Mailman School study, a quarter of the men older than 50 years without a history of prostate cancer who were among the population of 7,000 men studied, remain unaware of the PSA test.
“Our primary findings suggested that smoking, physical inactivity and obesity are inversely associated with awareness of the PSA test. These risk behaviors are linked with higher prostate cancer morbidity and mortality,” said Firas S. Ahmed, MD, MPH, Mailman School of Public Health, and first author. This finding may be due to a general lack of concern about health maintenance or less interactions with health care providers by smokers, according to Dr. Ahmed.
California tobacco control program saved billions in medical costs
California’s state tobacco control program saved $86 billion--in 2004 dollars--in personal healthcare costs in its first 15 years, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
During the same period, the state spent only a total of $1.8 billion on the program, a 50-to-1 return on investment, according to study findings. The study is the first that has been able to quantifiably connect tobacco control to healthcare savings, say its authors.
The healthcare savings occurred because the program prevented 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes--worth $9.2 billion to the tobacco industry--from being smoked between 1989, when the state-funded California Tobacco Control Program began, and 2004, when this study ended.
Study shows why once is enough to hook some smokers
For some people, one cigarette is all it takes to become hooked on nicotine, while others are repelled by it.
Researchers in Canada have found a region in the brains of rats that may be the key to these differences.
By manipulating specific molecular doorways into brain cells called receptors, they were able to control which rats in the study enjoyed their first exposure to nicotine and which were repelled by it.
Prizes don’t help smokers kick the habit long-term
Contests that offer smokers cash and other incentives to quit don’t produce better long-term results than smoking cessation efforts that don’t reward people for kicking the habit, a new analysis of existing research demonstrates.
“While competitions may be an attractive and high-profile way of encouraging smokers to make a quit attempt, our evidence found that they don’t improve the long-term success rate,” Dr. Kate Cahill of the University of Oxford told Reuters Health in an email interview. “Many people relapse once the competition is over and the prizes stop coming.”
In the U.S., such contests are typically offered in the workplace, while the highest-profile initiatives outside the U.S. are the international “Quit & Win” contests, run every 2 years in more than 80 countries, Cahill explained.
Teen smokers struggle to kick the habit; most want to quit and can’t
Most teenagers who smoke cigarettes make repeated attempts to quit but most are unsuccessful, according to new research from the Université de Montréal and funded by the Canadian Cancer Society.
“The study found that teen smokers make their first serious attempt to quit after only two and a half months of smoking, and by the time they have smoked for 21 months they have lost confidence in their ability to quit,” says Dr. Jennifer O’Loughlin, the study’s lead author and a researcher from the Université de Montréal’s department of social and preventive medicine.
Dr. O’Loughlin analyzed data from 319 Montreal teens who completed reports on their smoking habits every three months for five years. The study, published online (today) in the American Journal of Public Health, found that teen smokers progress through stages or milestones in their attempts to stop smoking. These stages are:
Smoking linked to decrease in uterine cancer risk
Cigarette smoking appears to be associated with a decreased risk of cancer of the endometrium, the inner lining of the uterus, research from China suggests.
“The benefit of smoking was observed almost exclusively in postmenopausal women and not in premenopausal women,” principal investigator Dr. Bin Wang of Nanjing Medical University told Reuters Health.
However, in spite of this link, “cigarette smoking could dramatically increase the incidence of many other chronic diseases,” Wang pointed out.
Contests to Quit Smoking Don’t Work in Long Run
Face it: we all have our price. Still, despite prizes ranging from lottery tickets to cash payments, quit-smoking contests do not help people kick the habit in the end, according to a new systematic review of studies.
None of the 17 studies, which involved roughly 6,300 participants, demonstrated significantly higher long-term quit rates for smokers offered incentives, despite some creative approaches.
In one study, participants were encouraged to toss their cigarettes down the toilet and rewarded with one lottery ticket per day. Another offered payments of $10 per month and participation in a monthly worksite lottery. Yet another offered cash prizes ranging from $100 to $250, along with certificates of recognition.
Caregivers often expose asthmatic kids to smoke
Secondhand exposure to cigarette smoke is an asthma trigger in children and a new study shows that smoking by the primary caregiver and daycare provider are important sources of smoke exposure in children with asthma.
In the study, children with asthma who were exposed to secondhand smoke “had as much smoke exposure as if their mother smoked,” Dr. Harold J. Farber told Reuters Health.
Children with a double hit of smoke exposure - from both their daycare provider and primary caregiver - had the highest levels of nicotine metabolites in their urine, said Farber, of Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.
Treatment for cigarette, alcohol and drug use in pregnancy improves outcomes for mom and baby
Pregnant women who receive treatment for substance abuse early in their pregnancy can achieve the same health outcomes as pregnant women with no substance abuse, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in the Journal of Perinatology.
The study, which is the largest to date, examined 49,985 women in Kaiser Permanente’s prenatal care program and found that integrating substance abuse screening and treatment into routine prenatal care helped pregnant women achieve similar health outcomes as women who were not using cigarettes, alcohol or other drugs. This is also the largest study to examine multiple substances: cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamines, cocaine and heroin.
“This program can happen everywhere and should become the gold standard for women who are pregnant and using cigarettes, alcohol or other drugs,” said study lead author Nancy C. Goler, M.D., an OB/GYN and Kaiser Permanente regional medical director of the Early Start Program for the organization’s Northern California operations. “The study’s big finding was that study participants treated in the Early Start program had outcomes similar to our control group, women who had no evidence of substance abuse.”
Fewer Heart Disease Deaths in Massachusetts as Smoking Declines
If more states introduce tobacco control programs for their residents who are regular smokers, the number of U.S. deaths due to coronary heart disease might drop, finds a new study that looks at an ongoing Massachusetts initiative.
A connection exists between coronary heart disease and cigarette smoking, and the new study determines how a reduction in smoking affected the number of related deaths in Massachusetts between 1993 and 2003. The state introduced its Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program (MTCP) in 1992, which received funding through a special cigarette tax, and the researchers say they expected to find it helped control the rate of smoking.
“California was the first state to have a statewide program like the MTCP and they witnessed substantial declines,” said lead author Zubair Kabir, M.D., who at the time of the study was a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. “So it was not surprising that Massachusetts, the second state, would see such declines as well, which reflect the impact of a comprehensive, integrated and - at the time - well-funded program.”
Lung cancer no more common in women smokers: study
Women who smoke are no more likely than men to get lung cancer but, among non-smokers, women appear to have a higher risk than men, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
Women who had never smoked were 1.3 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who had never smoked, Dr. Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues found.
“We noted slightly higher age-standardized incidence rates of lung cancer in women who had never smoked than in men who had never smoked,” Freedman and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Smoking in midlife may impair memory
Middle-aged adults who smoke appear to have a higher than average risk of developing memory impairments, according to a report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“With the aging population and the projected increases in older adults with dementia, it is important to identify modifiable risk factors,” lead author Dr. Severine Sabia told Reuters Health. “Our results suggest that smoking had an adverse effect on cognitive function in midlife. However, 10 years after smoking cessation, there is little adverse effect of smoking on cognition. Thus, public health messages should target smokers at all ages.”
In fact, long-term ex-smokers were less likely to have deficits in memory, vocabulary, and verbal fluency than those who never smoked. This “could be explained by improvement in other health behaviors among those giving up smoking in midlife,” said Sabia, a researcher with the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in Villejuif, France.
Report confirms increased risk of smoking, substance abuse in bipolar adolescents
A study from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) supports previous reports that adolescents with bipolar disorder are at increased risk for smoking and substance abuse. The article appearing in the June Drug and Alcohol Dependence – describing the largest such investigation to date and the first to include a control group – also indicates that bipolar-associated risk is independent of the risk conferred by other disorders affecting study participants.
“This work confirms that bipolar disorder (BPD) in adolescents is a huge risk factor for smoking and substance abuse, as big a risk factor as is juvenile delinquency,” says Timothy Wilens, MD, director of Substance Abuse Services in MGH Pediatric Psychopharmacology, who led the study. “It indicates both that young people with BPD need to carefully be screened for smoking and for substance use and abuse and that adolescents known to abuse drugs and alcohol – especially those who binge use – should also be assessed for BPD.”
It has been estimated that up to 20 percent of children and adolescents treated for psychiatric problems have bipolar disorder, and there is evidence that pediatric and adolescent BPD may have features, such as particularly frequent and dramatic mood swings, not found in the adult form of the disorder. While elevated levels of smoking and substance abuse previously have been reported in young and adult BPD patients, it has not been clear how the use and abuse of substances relates to the presence of BPD or whether any increased risk could be attributed to co-existing conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder or anxiety disorders.
Second Hand Smoke Increases Hospital Admissions for All Types of Infectious Diseases
Children exposed to second hand tobacco smoke are more likely to get severe infectious diseases and have to be admitted to hospital, finds research published online ahead of print in Tobacco Control.
These children are at greater risk of a whole range of infectious illnesses, such as meningococcal disease, and not just respiratory illness, the results showed. Exposure to smoke in the first few months of life did the most harm, especially if they had a low birth weight or had been born prematurely.
The researchers assessed the relationship between second hand smoke exposure and first admission to hospital for any infectious illness for 7,402 children born in Hong Kong in April and May 1997. The children were followed until they were eight.
Smokers quit in groups
When smokers decide to kick the habit, odds are they are not alone in making that decision. New research shows that social ties play a key role in smoking behavior and if a close associate or relative, or even a distant one, stops smoking, a person’s odds of quitting increase.
“We’ve found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once,” Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, who was involved in the study, said in a statement.
There has been a marked drop in smoking prevalence in the US and “network phenomena” are likely to be involved in this trend, Christakis and co-investigator Dr. James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, note a report in Thursday’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
