Researchers find link between advertising and increased tobacco use among India's youth

As the westernization of India accelerates, tobacco advertising and marketing have been linked to increased tobacco use by urban Indian children as young as 11, according to a study by researchers at The University of Texas School of Public Health.

The study, “Associations Between Tobacco Marketing and Use Among Urban Youth In India,” is published in the May/June issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior.

Findings from an earlier published study by the researchers revealed that in 2004, Indian sixth graders were using three times the amount of tobacco as eighth graders, which the authors found might indicate a new wave of increased tobacco use. The second study sought to discover the reason for the jump.

“As India becomes more westernized, more teens will use tobacco,” said the study’s principal investigator Cheryl Perry, Ph.D., professor and regional dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health Austin Regional Campus. “The sixth graders as a group are already thinking that smoking is cool while the eighth graders haven’t been as exposed to the Western message.”

After the major tobacco company settlements of 1998 that included more stringent laws banning pro-smoking advertising, smoking has dropped among American youth. According to The Monitoring the Future study, daily smoking among eighth graders dropped from 8.8 percent in 1998 to 3 percent in 2007.

“The current study is the first in India to demonstrate a strong, dose-response relationship between exposure and receptivity to tobacco advertising and promotions and tobacco use among Indian youth. These associations clearly suggest a need to strengthen policy and program-based interventions to reduce tobacco use among youth in India,” said Melissa Stigler, Ph.D., assistant professor at the UT School of Public Health and study co-author, who did much of the ground work in India.

Chewing tobacco and aromatic cigarettes called “bidis” account for the majority of tobacco use in India with cigarettes taking 20 percent of the market.

While tobacco advertising was banned in India in 2004, the year the study began, cigarette companies are coming up with new ways to reach a relatively untapped audience, Stigler said. Event sponsorship and lifestyle stores centered on tobacco products are slipping through the cracks of the law.

As part of the 2004 law, smoking is also banned in public areas such as indoor malls, but tobacco companies have responded with air-conditioned mobile smoking lounges.

“On a visit there shortly after the 2004 law was enacted, I witnessed a long line of college age students lined up for one of the mobile lounges, which was parked outside an upscale shopping mall.” Stigler said.

The government is still working through the courts to determine the extent of the ban. For example, Stigler said, actors have started to stop smoking cigarettes in Bollywood movies but they now sing and dance about it instead.

The researchers found the link between advertising and tobacco use among the Indian youth to be alarming.

“I was surprised that they were so strongly influenced,” Perry said. “The more exposed the youth were to tobacco advertising, the more likely they were to have ever used or be currently using tobacco.”

The study, which included 11,642 sixth and eighth graders, was produced in collaboration with Indian organizations Health Related Information Dissemination Amongst Youth in Delhi and Tamil Nadu Voluntary Health Association in Chennai.

The researchers found that 37 percent of youth in the study had seen tobacco advertising in more than four places while 50 percent had seen advertising in one to four places.

Tobacco use rose with measures of receptivity, including having a favorite tobacco advertisement, believing misleading imagery created by tobacco advertisements and being willing to use a tobacco promotional item (such as wearing a T-shirt that advertises tobacco).

The news comes on the heels of new research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine’s Feb. 13 issue, which predicts that in India, by the year 2010, one million deaths per year will be the result of smoking.

Source: University of Texas

Related stories:

New study explains why anti-smoking ads backfire or succeed
Some anti-smoking ads are simply ineffective, while others actually make youth more likely to light up. Fortunately, some are successful, and a new University of Georgia study helps explain why.
Steps needed to reduce smoking in the US
A combination of increased excise taxes, nationwide indoor smoking bans, and other measures would significantly lower the U.S. smoking rate, which now hovers at around 21 percent of the adult population, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. But to achieve faster, more certain reductions, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be given broad regulatory authority over tobacco marketing, packaging, and distribution, and other revisions to current tobacco policy should be enacted, said the committee that wrote the report.
States urged to continue anti-tobacco ads
Teenagers who are exposed to state-sponsored anti-tobacco advertising are less likely to smoke, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers said Tuesday.
Gates, Bloomberg pool riches to fight smoking
(AP) -- Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg are pooling their piles of money to pour $375 million into a global effort to cut smoking.
Tobacco industry manipulated cigarette menthol content to recruit new smokers among young people
Menthol cigarette brands have been rising in popularity with adolescents, and the highest use has been among younger, newer smokers. Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) explored tobacco industry manipulation of menthol levels in specific brands and found a deliberate strategy to recruit and addict young smokers by adjusting menthol to create a milder experience for the first time smoker. Menthol masks the harshness and irritation of cigarettes, allowing delivery of an effective dose of nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarettes. These milder products were then marketed to the youngest potential consumers.
Perceived access to cigarettes predicts youth smoking
Kids who see cigarettes as easily accessible are more likely to end up as regular smokers, particularly if they have friends who smoke, according to a new report published in the current issue of Annals of Family Medicine. The study, funded by the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program (SAPRP) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, could be valuable to smoking intervention efforts by allowing health professionals to identify and target high-risk children.
Genetic variations put youth at higher risk for lifetime of tobacco addiction
Common genetic variations affecting nicotine receptors in the nervous system can significantly increase the chance that European Americans who begin smoking by age 17 will struggle with lifelong nicotine addiction, according to researchers at the University of Utah and their colleagues at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, published in the July 11, 2008 issue of PLoS Genetics, highlights the importance of public health efforts to reduce the number of youth who begin smoking.
U of T research supports Ontario ban on cigarette displays
Toronto, ON. – Just weeks before Ontario implements a ban on the retail display of all tobacco products, new research from the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit at the University of Toronto shows that consumers have been bombarded by extensive tobacco promotion at point of sale.

News discussion:

Medicine & Health news