Tobacco.org

• Can secondhand smoke hurt kids' grades?  

Children and teenagers exposed to secondhand smoke at home may get poorer grades than their peers from smoke-free homes, a study of Hong Kong students suggests. . . .

In the new study, researchers found that among 23,000 11- to 20-year-old non-smoking students, the one-third who lived with at least one smoker were more likely to describe their own school performance as "poor."

Of students who said they were exposed to smoking at home at least five days a week, 23 percent said their school performance was poor compared with their classmates'. That rate was 20 percent among kids who had less frequent secondhand-smoke exposure at home, and 17 percent among those from smoke-free homes. . . .

Ho's team notes, it is biologically plausible that the many toxic compounds in tobacco smoke -- including lead, arsenic, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide -- could affect children's cognitive abilities. The researchers were able to account for certain other factors, like parents' education levels and the type of housing -- both markers of socioeconomic status. They found that students' exposure to secondhand smoke, itself, was linked to a 14 percent to 28 percent greater risk of poor school performance, depending on how frequent the exposure was. . . .

Dr. Sai-Yin Ho and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong report the results in the Journal of Pediatrics.

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Cigarette sales on rise in Maine  

For the first time in years, cigarette sales in Maine are up as measured by the sale of the tax stamps that must be on every pack sold in the state. In the first six months of this year, tax stamp sales were up 5 percent.

“This is the first time that anybody at [Maine] Revenue Services can remember where we actually had an increase in our cigarette stamp sales, and it has been a 5 percent increase since the start of the calendar year and that is unheard of,” said Mike Allen, research director at MRS.

He said for years there has been a decrease in tax stamp sales of 1 or 2 percent every year, but for the budget year that ended June 30, sales were up 1 percent over a year ago.

“No one in the office could remember when we had an increase, year over year,” he said.

Anti-smoking advocates say it adds to the evidence that after years of decline, smoking is on the increase in Maine and there need to be further efforts to discourage the habit.

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High School Students With ADHD: The Group Most Likely to...Fizzle 

Adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, or who smoke cigarettes are least likely to finish high school (HS) on time or most likely to drop out altogether, researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine (UC Davis) have found. The researchers analyzed data collected during 2001 and 2002 from the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions to examine the “joint predictive effects of childhood and adolescent onset psychiatric and substance use disorders on failure to graduate [on time].”1

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Homeopathic Nasal Zinc Linked to Loss of Smell 

However, there are no randomized, controlled clinical trials that conclude a loss of smell is one of the possible outcomes from using these products, making it harder to prove cause-and-effect.

Since it would be impossible, as well as unethical, to try to conduct such a study now, Davidson and his colleague, Dr. Wendy Smith, applied the "Bradford Hill Criteria" to 25 patients they had seen for the sudden loss of smell after using a zinc gel product.

The Bradford Hill Criteria were developed in 1965 by a statistician who wanted to establish a causal link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. The nine key criteria necessary to find a causal link include: strength of the association, consistency, specificity, timing, dose-response (does more of the substance make the problem worse?), biological plausibility, biological coherence, experimental evidence and analogy.

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Teens With ADHD Often Have Trouble Completing High School 

Teens with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to drop out of high school or delay completing high school than other kids, a new study has found. . . .

Smoking was also associated with a high risk of dropping out. The study found that 29 percent of students who smoked failed to complete high school on time, compared with 20 percent of those who used alcohol and 24.6 percent of those who used drugs.

The study was published in the July online edition of the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

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Dropping the habit 

Californians are sick of smoking--or, if nothing else, they're sick of paying so much to smoke. The Board of Equalization's recent study on smoking habits reveals an 8.1 percent decline in cigarettes sold in California in 2009-10 over the previous year. . . .

Year Packs sold (millions) Average price

1967 2,383 $.41

1977 2,774 $.59

1987 2,570 $1.17

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High School Incompletion Rates Highest in Teens With ADHD 

Teenagers with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to drop out of high school or delay high school graduation than their counterparts with more "serious" mental health conditions, new national data suggest.

Investigators at the UC Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento, California, found that compared with teens with no psychiatric disorders, those with the combined type of ADHD were more than twice as likely to drop out or finish high school on time. In addition, ADHD trumped high school incompletion rates for other mental health disorders, including mania, mood disorders, and panic disorders.

Conduct disorder and smoking were also significantly associated with an increased risk of failing to complete high school on time, but ADHD still led the pack.

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CAMPBELL: It is right that we should be responsible for our health 

Is Andrew Lansley happy with anything about the way healthcare is organised and delivered? It seems not. First, he produced an NHS reform white paper to radically alter Nye Bevan's creation in ways that would horrify its founding father. Then, on Monday, he announced a major cull of health quangos. He also plans to bring a similarly unforgiving eye to public health – the messy, politically sensitive and sometimes fatal business of food, drink, drugs, smoking, infection, driving habits and sexual behaviour.

His speech on 7 July to the annual conference of the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH) will be . . . "We have to find a new approach – to think new thoughts. We need a paradigm shift," he said.

Central to his new approach will be a reliance on more people showing more personal responsibility: eating more healthily, exercising more, no longer drinking more than is good for them and so on.

Lansley wants to reduce the growing demand on the NHS, and points out that "nearly a quarter of the deaths in this country each year result, in part at least, from the consequences of unhealthy lifestyle". He has set himself a very big challenge. "We have to impact on demand. That means we have to change behaviour, and change people's relationships with each other, and with drugs, alcohol, tobacco and food," he said.

This is challenging, politically bold, stuff. . . .

It will be fascinating to see how he intends to encourage the greater discipline he says is needed. By exhortation? Unlikely, given Lansley's rejection of "nannying and lecturing". Through financial incentives, such as those used by primary care trusts to get people to lose weight or take a chlamydia test? Or by threat, such as making access to public healthcare conditional on behaviour change or paying charges? Lansley's answer involves incentives such as pedometers, which increase users' physical activity; telling smokers their "lung age", which makes them more likely to quit; and his belief that "advertising social norms can snap people out of the fantasy that their drinking, smoking or eating habits are the same as everyone else's". Public health has just got personal.

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Thoughts and Acts of Aggression/Violence Toward Others Reported in Association with Varenicline(September) (FREE) 

OBJECTIVE: To identify the common characteristics of these thoughts and acts of aggression/violence toward others and assess the likely relationship to varenicline treatment.

METHODS: We obtained 78 adverse event reports from the Food and Drug Administration MedWatch database . . .

CONCLUSIONS: The clear temporal relationship, lack of prior history of this behavior, and unusual nature of these events strengthens the accumulating scientific evidence that varenicline is associated with thoughts and acts of aggression/violence. We recommend that physicians and pharmacists ensure that all patients are informed of possible psychiatric symptoms of varenicline, including violent and aggressive thoughts. All patients should be advised to contact a health-care provider immediately if these symptoms occur and varenicline should be discontinued without delay.

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• Stop-Smoking Aid Chantix Sparks Safety Concerns 

Evidence is accumulating that the stop-smoking drug Chantix is linked with unprovoked acts and thoughts of aggression and violence, according to a new report.

The drug is so potentially dangerous that its use should be restricted to exclude police, military, and similar occupations in which workers carry weapons, says Thomas J. Moore, senior scientist for drug safety and policy at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices in Horsham, Pa. Moore is one of three co-authors of the new report on the drug, published in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy.

"My colleagues and I have been concerned about the safety profile of [Chantix] since our first report [warning of adverse events] in 2008," Moore tells WebMD.

But others, including a smoking cessation researcher and a spokesperson for Pfizer, which makes Chantix, disagreed strongly. They point out that the number of adverse events is far outweighed by the benefits of the drug

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ADHD, smoking may be linked with dropping out of school  

Many roads can lead to a teen dropping out of high school, but a new study finds that having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and smoking may be strongly linked to not finishing school.

Researchers from UC Davis looked at data on 29,662 people from the the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions. Out of 29,662 people in the study, 32.3% of students who had a combined form of ADHD (hyperactivity and inattentiveness) dropped out of high school. . . .

Smoking was another important factor in leaving high school early. Among tobacco users, 29% dropped out. Those who drank alcohol had a 20% drop out rate, and those who used drugs had a 24.6% drop out rate. Combining smoking with alcohol and drugs did not increase the risk of dropping out.

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• Follow the money: How the billions of dollars that flow from smokers in poor nations to companies in rich nations greatly exceed funding for global tobacco control and what might be done about it  

The business of selling cigarettes is increasingly concentrated in the hands of five tobacco companies that collectively control almost 90% of the world's cigarette market, four of which are publicly traded corporations. The economic activities of these cigarette manufacturers can be monitored through their reports to shareholders and other public documents. Reports for 2008 show that the revenues of these five companies exceeded $300 billion, of which more than $160 billion was provided to governments as taxes, and that corporate earnings of the four publicly traded companies were over $25 billion, of which $14 billion was retained after corporate income taxes were paid. By contrast, funding for domestic and international tobacco control is not reliably reported. Estimated funding for global tobacco control in 2008, at $240 million, is significantly lower than resources provided to address other high-mortality global health challenges. Tobacco control has not yet benefited from the innovative finance mechanisms that are in place for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The Framework Convention On Tobacco Control (FCTC) process could be used to redirect some of the earnings from transnational tobacco sales to fund FCTC implementation or other global health efforts.

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Briefings: Monthly Newsletter: August 2010 

July 27, 2010 Letter from Diane Canova

Dear Partners,

Partnership for Prevention and ActionToQuit were very pleased with the announcement in mid-July of new regulations under the Affordable Health Care Act requiring private health plans to cover evidence-based preventive services and to eliminate cost-sharing for preventive care. Among the services to be covered are tobacco cessation interventions to for tobacco users.

July 28, 2010 Views on Unassisted Cessation: An Interview with Steve Schroeder

Simon Chapman has written about the neglect of "unassisted cessation." . . .

July 28, 2010 "Celebrating Smokefree Voices" YouTube Contest Winner

The Smokefree Women web site www.smokefreewomen.gov has just celebrated its 1-year anniversary with a video contest on YouTube. People were asked to submit videos explaining why women should stay smokefree or why they want the women they love to be or stay smokefree. More than 14,000 people voted for their favorite of the many videos that were submitted.

July 28, 2010 State and City News

-University of Arizona Providing Cessation Training for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Professionals

-South Dakota Smoking Down to 17.5 Percent

-Los Angeles County Report Shows Smoking Rates by Local Community . . .

Key Dates

September 13 - 17, 2010 Tobacco Treatment Specialist Certification

http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=854142

Columbus, OH

September 30 - 1, 2010 Online Social Networks and Smoking Cessation: Strategic Research Opportunities

http://www.legacyforhealth.org/PDF/SNCC_Final_Program.pdf

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Smoking’s impact on health 'catastrophic'  

More than 20,000 New Yorkers under the age of 18 become new smokers each year despite efforts by the state health department to encourage smoking cessation, and the agency is now introducing two new television public service announcements to sound the alert.

The state Health Department on Wednesday also released its latest figures of smoking rates by county for the period from July 2008- June 2009. Approximately 18.6 percent of Rensselaer County residents over the age of 18 were reported as smokers while in Albany County, the rate for that period was 16.5 percent.

A total of 17 percent of New Yorkers statewide smoke, with adult smoking rates of 14.5 in New York City and 18.5 percent for the rest of the state excluding the Big Apple. Statewide, Rockland County had the lowest percentage of smokers - just 9.7 percent of residents over the age of 18. The highest percentages of adult smokers were in Franklin, Orleans and Sullivan counties.Health care professionals say smoking is one of the leading problems plaguing the health care industry . . .

State health officials unveiled two new advertisements on Wednesday at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, home of the New York state Smokers' Quitline.

In one ad, a surgeon's gloved hand squeezes out thick, fatty depositions

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• August 2010, Volume 19, Number 4 - TOC