Teens with jobs more likely to smoke
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High school students who work at jobs for pay appear to be more likely to start smoking than their peers who don’t work outside of school, researchers report. They also found that youths who work longer hours are more likely to smoke that those who work fewer hours.
Dr. Rajeev Ramchand, a behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation in Arlington, Virginia, and colleagues looked at the relationship between working for pay and the initiation of smoking among nearly 800 urban, predominantly African-American students.
“Among youth who had not yet started smoking at the tenth grade, those who started working between the tenth and eleventh grades were at least 3-times more likely to start smoking than those who did not start working during the same interval,” Ramchand told Reuters Health.
The students had been followed since first grade as part of the Baltimore Prevention and Intervention Research Center studies, the investigators report in the American Journal of Public Health.
At the 10th year of follow-up, when the students were between 14 and 18 years old and in the 10th grade, the investigators also identified a positive association between the hours students worked for pay and their current tobacco use.
The teens working 1 to 10 hours per week tended to start smoking later than their peers who worked more than 10 hours per week or non-workers.
Ramchand’s group suggests that young workers may start smoking to take breaks or to cope with the stresses of both working and going to school. They also have increased access to cigarette sources and funds to purchase cigarettes.
“As smoking is the single most preventable risk factor for death in the United States, healthcare consumers should be fully engaged in making sure that youth do not start smoking (or) delaying the age at which they might first try a cigarette,” Ramchand said.
Noting that lifelong smokers are more likely to begin smoking in adolescence, Ramchand suggests, “Future efforts to prevent smoking among youth should be focused on workplaces where kids are likely to find jobs.”
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, November 2007
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