Cigarettes Aren't Cool, California Teens Say

Cigarettes Aren't Cool, California Teenagers Say

However youngsters nonetheless do not see nicotine as addictive and will go for e-cigarettes as a substitute

WebMD Information from HealthDay

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Dec. 6, 2016 (HealthDay Information) -- Cigarettes are one accent as we speak's California teenagers are greater than prepared to forego, a brand new survey finds.

Fewer of them than ever assume cigarettes are cool, the research discovered, and plenty of view smoking as riskier and fewer socially acceptable than they did a few decade in the past.

This discovering mirrors what's taking place throughout the nation, the place cigarette smoking amongst teenagers has declined significantly over the previous 20 years. The drop is essentially the results of smoke-free insurance policies and public well being campaigns that highlighted the harms of smoking, the researchers mentioned.

That is the excellent news. On the flip facet, teenagers are turning to e-cigarettes, hookahs, cigars and chewing tobacco to get their nicotine repair, in keeping with the authors of a brand new research.

"Adolescents are nonetheless not conscious of the addictive properties of nicotine," mentioned lead researcher Bonnie Halpern-Felsher. She's a professor of pediatrics within the division of adolescent drugs at Stanford College College of Medication in California.

Nicotine is extra addictive to the growing mind, Halpern-Felsher mentioned. "Due to how nicotine impacts the mind, teenagers usually tend to change into addicted than [other people] and have a tougher time quitting," she mentioned.

The change in attitudes towards cigarettes is essentially attributable to aggressive tobacco management efforts and well being messaging "which have modified the perceptual panorama round cigarettes," Halpern-Felsher mentioned.

"We have to pay extra consideration to the addictive properties of all tobacco merchandise. We have to speak about nicotine and never simply cigarettes," she defined.

"We have to apply the identical messages we had about cigarettes to e-cigarettes and different merchandise, and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] must be focusing extra messages on habit and short-term well being dangers of those merchandise," Halpern-Felsher instructed.

In two surveys -- one in 2001 and the opposite in 2015 -- the researchers collected knowledge from a complete of practically 700 California highschool college students to see how attitudes towards smoking had modified over time.

The outcomes confirmed a lower within the variety of teenagers that plan to smoke or assume smoking makes them look mature, whereas extra teenagers imagine that smoking is more likely to trigger well being issues, Halpern-Felsher mentioned.