�Adolescents world Health Organization have tried cigarettes by seventh grade are often more likely to suit regular smokers and have got behavior problems as teens, a new study finds.
"We were stricken by the degree to which early smoking appeared to indicate that kids were on the fast track toward a troubled adolescence," aforesaid Phyllis Ellickson, Ph.D., world Health Organization led the team of researchers at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif. "We wanted to find out what factors in early and after adolescence mightiness help these high-risk kids avoid negative consequences."
The report appears in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The researchers collected data at seventh, 10th and 12th ground level from 2,000 students in California and Oregon who were early smokers in middle school. They tested the students' saliva samples for tobacco and marijuana to ensure accuracy.
At the beginning of middle school, 30 percent of the early smokers had recently used cigarettes, 14 percent were smoking regularly and 21 percent had multiple school problems, the authors wrote.
Ellickson and her colleagues ground that having peers world Health Organization smoke was a strong risk factor for becoming a regular smoker. At-risk teens were two or more times likely than low-risk teens those world Health Organization hadn't tested smoking by seventh grade to have peers wHO smoke and five times more likely to have had deuce or more problems in school.
"At grade seven, problems in school included being sent out of the classroom more than than once, skipping school multiple times and absenteeism," Ellickson said.
By the end of high school, 36 percent of early smokers were smoking regularly and 58 per centum had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including tear drinking, abusing and marketing drugs and dropping extinct of schooling, according to the study.
The researchers constitute that teens who had not tried smoking by seventh level were 1.5 times more likely to be those wHO had ripe grades and lived in an integral family. In other words, good grades B or higher and living in an intact nuclear syndicate helped protect early smokers against these negative outcomes.
The RAND researchers complete that teens whose parents disapproved of smoking and drug exercise had depress risks of problem behavior. They suggested that universal prevention programs that target peer resistance and parental involvement could help turnabout the trends found in the study.
Jeanie Alter, platform manager and lead evaluator of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University's School or Health, Physical Education and Recreation, agreed that prevention programs can benefit teens at risk and stressed that the parents' role is key.
"Clearly, peers are an influential factor in the lives of young the great unwashed, particularly as they progress through adolescence," she aforesaid. "However, it is critical to acknowledge the significant and free burning influence of parents. Though difficult to implement, programme planners plainly must imply parents and increase their disapproval of drug use."
Ellickson PL, Tucker JS, Klein DJ. Reducing early smokers' risk for future smoke and other problem doings: insights from a five-year longitudinal work. J Adolesc Health 43(2), 2008.
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