They analyzed the occurrence of depictions of tobacco use, including brand appearances and smoking paraphernalia, for periods of at least five minutes (tobacco intervals) in the 15 most commercially successful films screened in the UK between 1989 and 2008.

Commercial success was defined as accounting for around 50% or more of each year’s gross box office takings, while smoking paraphernalia included ashtrays, lighters, etc.

Between 1989 and 2008, the average occurrence of five minute tobacco intervals plummeted from 3.5 per hour to 0.6 for all films, a fall of 80%.

But imagery persisted in all age categories of films given a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. This included those deemed suitable for children and young teens.

Two thirds of films classified for under 18s and over half (61%) classified for under 15s featured tobacco intervals. Between 2004 and 2008, of the films containing tobacco intervals, 92% were rated as suitable for those under 18.

Among the 15 most popular films, tobacco intervals occurred in seven out of 10 films, over half of which (56%) were classified as suitable for those under 15 and 92% for those under 18.

The film with the highest number of brand appearances was Pulp Fiction, which was classified for adults (18).

But brand appearances were nearly twice as likely to occur in films with UK involvement. UK producers were involved in one out of five films and were solely responsible for 3% between 1989 and 2008.

Twelve different brands appeared in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (certificate 15) — the highest for any film. In “About a Boy” (certificate 12), the main character smoked Silk Cut regularly throughout the film, yet in the book on which the film was based, the lead character smoked infrequently and no particular brand was mentioned.

Marlboro and Silk Cut were the two brands most likely to be featured. While Marlboro has more than 42% of market share in the US, Silk Cut has just 5% of UK market share, prompting the authors to suggest that its appearance was "disproportionate."

"The specific repeated occurrence of some brands of cigarette in some films raises the possibility that product placement by tobacco companies is still occurring," they suggest.

Smoking in films is a potent driver of youth and adult smoking, say the authors, who suggest that film certification should take smoking into account for films targeted to young people.

." ..it is apparent that children and young people watching films in the UK are still exposed to frequent and at times specifically branded tobacco imagery, particularly in films originating from the UK," they conclude.

Science Daily reports that this population-based research is the first to examine the association of childhood ETS with early emphysema by CT scan in nonsmokers. Approximately half of the participants in this large multiethnic cohort had at least one regular cigarette smoker in their childhood home. Participants with more childhood ETS exposure had more emphysema-like lung pixels; an average of 20% of scan pixels were emphysema-like for those who lived with two or more smokers as a child, compared with 18% for those who lived with one regular smoker, or 17% for those who said that they did not live with a regular inside smoker as a child.

The researchers studied CT scans of 1,781 non-smokers without clinical cardiovascular disease recruited from six communities in the United States, including northern Manhattan and the Bronx, New York. Those reporting childhood ETS exposure were somewhat younger with an average age of 61, were more likely to be non- Hispanic white, and were less likely to have been born outside the United States. These differences were statistically controlled in the analyses.

"We were able to detect a difference on CT scans between the lungs of participants who lived with a smoker as a child and those who did not," observed Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. "Some known harmful effects of tobacco smoke are short term, and this new research suggests that effects of tobacco smoke on the lungs may also persist for decades."

Previous studies have found evidence that childhood ETS exposure affects perinatal and childhood health outcomes, and that adult exposure may affect adult respiratory health outcomes, including lung function and respiratory symptoms.

Although childhood ETS was not associated with adult lung function in this healthy population, this does not contradict the results for early emphysema, since airflow obstruction and anatomic damage are theoretically and clinically distinguishable. "However, emphysema may be a more sensitive measure of damage compared with lung function in this relatively healthy cohort," Dr. Lovasi notes.

Combined emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are projected to become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2020.

The exposure information in this study does not provide information on the timing of ETS exposure during childhood, making it difficult to distinguish as exposure in utero. "The association between childhood ETS and early emphysema among participants whose mothers did not smoke, suggests that the effect we are detecting is for smoke exposure in the home during childhood rather than in utero exposure alone," observed Dr. Lovasi.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program and the National Institutes of Health.

"We were able to show that children who are exposed to tobacco smoke prenatally and during the first years of life have a higher risk of developing abnormal behavioral symptoms when they are of school age," said Dr. Joachim Heinrich of the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Zentrum München. "Moreover, it makes a difference whether the child was exposed to tobacco smoke first after birth or was already confronted with it during prenatal development."

According to the study, children who were only exposed to tobacco smoke prenatally have a 1.9 times higher risk of developing abnormal behavioral symptoms in comparison to children without any exposure (change this if it is the wrong comparison). The risk for children first exposed to tobacco smoke after birth is 1.3 times higher. Furthermore, children who were exposed to tobacco smoke both while in the womb and while growing up doubled the risk of developing abnormal behavioral symptoms. Such symptoms include hyperactivity, attention deficits or problems in their relationships with peers. The results of the study were independent of affects from the social environment in which the children were growing up.

In the framework of the GINI-plus study, data of a large birth cohort comprising 5,991 children and their parents was analyzed. Extensive studies will follow up on this study.

"The value of our study is based not only on our prospective, investigative approach, but also on the comprehensiveness of our survey as to possible pollution levels for the unborn, infants and children at different times," Joachim Heinrich explained. "This makes it possible to determine the effects of prenatal and postnatal tobacco smoke exposure and to differentiate between them."

To ensure the validity of their results from the questionnaires, the scientists carried out carefully controlled tests to exclude possible bias due to social factors. Simon Rückinger, lead author of the study, stated: "The relationship we found between tobacco exposure during fetal development and early childhood and behavioral problems at school age was not biased by other factors of the social environment."

The findings make clear that tobacco smoke exposure has a significant impact on the behavioral development of children. The negative influence is greater on the unborn child during the pregnancy of the mother than it is after this sensitive developmental phase.

"If parents really don’t want their children to smoke, they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children." said Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study.

At the same time, parents can increase their children’s chances of smoking by their own use of tobacco. “If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens with non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves," said Kim.

Science Daily reports that the study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but had not advanced to daily smoking at that time. Daily smoking was defined as smoking one cigarette a day for the past 30 days prior to annual interviews. By the time the students were in the 12th grade, 156, or 58 percent, had become daily smokers.

The children in the study were 51 percent male and 85 percent white. They were drawn from a larger study looking at the development of healthy and problem behaviors among children at 10 suburban schools in the Pacific Northwest. Information about their smoking habits was collected during annual interviews from 7th through 12th grades.

Aside from parenting and parental tobacco use, other factors that predicted teen smoking were having friends who smoked and involvement in other problems behaviors such as skipping school, getting into fights, and engaging in vandalism.

Kim said most smoking prevention programs to not directly address the role of parental smoking or the link between anti-social behavior and smoking, which commonly occur together.

"Parents need to know that they are still important and can make their children feel good when they do something right and also know that there are consequences when they do something wrong. Many parents think adolescence is the time for children to have their independence. But it is important to maintain good supervision of your teen. Parents who smoke also need to understand that they are modeling behavior and if they quit smoking they send a strong message to their teenager," said Kim.

She recommends that parents "should not ignore childrens’ experimental smoking at any age because it put them at great risk of progressing to daily smoking." To do that, parents should:

• Set and enforce clear guideline about tobacco.
• Monitor to ensure that their children are following your guidelines.
• Know and monitor their children’s friends.
• Provide clear, consistent, and positive consequences for following those guidelines and appropriate, consistent negative consequences for violating them.
 

Previous studies have found that since the 1964 US Surgeon General’s report, the number of people who smoke cigarettes has declined. Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health take this research a step further by distinguishing occasional smokers from heavy smokers.

“Regular, heavy cigarette use frequently characterizes nicotine dependence and is the pattern of use thought to be most detrimental to health and longevity, but it has not been addressed in previous estimates of the decline of smoking prevalence,” said Renee Goodwin, Ph.D., associate professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and principle investigator of the study.

“Rather, earlier research mainly addressed tobacco use or cigarette smoking per se rather than examining the frequency and duration of cigarette use in detail,” she explained.

The new study finds not only that the number of American who are dependent on nicotine has remained steady over the past several decades, but also that the proportion of smokers who are currently addicted to nicotine is greater than in previous generations. Dr. Goodwin suggests that this could be because of anti-cigarette campaigns.

Smoking has been far more common among men than women for most of the past 40 years, but recent evidence shows that the gender gap has narrowed, and the current study finds increases in smoking women in several recent generations.

Socioeconomic status is thought to be another factor in cigarette use. The current study finds that younger women living in poverty had the highest rates of nicotine dependency compared with older generations and those not living in poverty. This suggests that despite increases in taxes and cigarette costs, those who are most vulnerable are still affected.

“Passage of this month’s law governing the regulation of tobacco products and its focus on preventing smoking initiation among children is important and timely as our findings suggest that the number of people who still smoke is considerable,” said Dr. Goodwin. “Hopefully this legislation will help reduce the number addicted to nicotine in future generations since never smoking is the only sure way to prevent the development of nicotine dependence.”

She continued, “Given the mounting evidence that nicotine dependence plays a crucial role in smoking patterns, there is no question that future studies on curbing cigarette use need to take nicotine dependence into account.”

The compound, called NNK, is a chemical substance that becomes carcinogenic when it is altered by the metabolic processes of the body. NNK does not appear to harm brain cells directly, but it may cause neuroinflammation, a condition that leads to disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis.

“Considering the extreme economical and disease burden of neuroinflammation-related disorders, it is extremely important from a medical, social, and economic point of view to discover if NNK in tobacco causes neuroinflammation” said Ghosh.

The team conducted two types of tests—one outside of a living host in glass and one in laboratory mice. They used blot analysis techniques that showed that the introduction of NNK resulted in a clear increase in proinflammatory signaling proteins, proinflammatory effector proteins, and other stress-related proteins. They also found increased levels of proinflammatory cytokines, which act as molecular messengers between cells.

This shows that NNK provokes an exaggerated response from the brain’s immune cells, known as microglia. These cells act as destroyers for the brain by attacking damaged or unhealthy cells. But when provoked by NNK, these cells start to attack healthy brain cells rather than the unhealthy ones they are supposed to attack.

NNK is present in all forms of tobacco, so it can also enter the body through chewing. In addition, second-hand smoking may lead to the same neuroinflammation conditions because NNK is also present in the smoke itself. Smoke-filled air indoors may contain up to 26 nanograms of NNK, and concentrations of NNK in tobacco can vary from 20-310 nanograms. This means that both direct and second-hand smoking can lead to substantial measures of NNK intake.

“This research sheds light on the processes that lead to nerve cell damage in those who smoke cigarettes or consume tobacco products on regular basis,” said Ghosh.