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 Tobacco use is the world’s leading cause of preventable death and
serious illness, killing an estimated 6 million people each year,
researchers note in the youth tobacco report from the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most smokers take up the
habit in their teens.
For the current study, researchers examined data from surveys of
teens in 61 countries conducted from 2012 to 2015. Half of nations
had a smoking rate of at least 15 percent for boys and at least 8
percent for girls, they found.
“Smoking has been shown to harm nearly every organ of the body, and
science shows that most adult smokers first start smoking during
adolescence,” said lead study author Rene Arrazola of the Office on
Smoking and Health at the CDC.
“Young people who begin to smoke at an earlier age are more likely
than those who start at older ages to develop long-term nicotine
addiction,” Arrazola said by email. “Therefore, efforts to prevent
youth tobacco use are critical to prevent another generation of
adults who smoke and suffer from smoking-related death and disease.”
Across all of the countries in the study, the lowest prevalence of
teen smoking (1.7 percent) was seen in Sri Lanka. The highest
prevalence (35 percent) was in Timor-Leste.
For boys, the lowest smoking prevalence was 2.9 percent in
Tajikistan and the highest was 61.4 percent in Timor-Leste. For
girls, the lowest rate - 1.6 percent – was seen in Tajikistan and
the highest - 29 percent - in Bulgaria.
In the majority of countries, at least half of current tobacco
smokers said they wanted to quit, the study also found. The
proportion of student smokers who said they desired to quit ranged
from a low of 32 percent in Uruguay to a high of 90 percent in the
Philippines.
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Limitations of the study include the reliance on teens to accurately
recall and report on their smoking behavior, the authors note. It
also only included students enrolled in school, which might not
fully represent smoking behavior in these countries.
“I was surprised to see that most of the countries were in the 10 to
20 percent range; I would have thought the numbers would be higher,
but they either are similar or slightly higher than rates in the
U.S. which are around 10 to 15 percent,” said Dr. Maher Karam-Hage,
associate medical director of the tobacco treatment program at MD
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
A variety of policies at the country level can influence whether
young teens will smoke, Karam-Hage, who wasn’t involved in the
study, said by email.
“Cultural values and norms in their individual countries are most
critical, followed by the economic factors (prices and taxes), age
restrictions and policies such as whether they have clean indoor air
(laws) or not,” Karam-Hage said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2rEruRA CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, online May 26, 2017.
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