Smoking is the principal preventable cause of ill health worldwide. It not only affects smokers themselves but is also extremely harmful to non-smokers who inhale environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). In non-smoking adults, ETS exposure causes lung and other cancers, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Perhaps less well kn...

OBJECTIVE To explore relationships between patterns of smoking uptake and social context and attitudinal variables. DESIGN Cross sectional survey. SETTING Public schools in Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. PARTICIPANTS 982 children in grades 6-9 (ages 11-15 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Items measuring smoking history, nicotine dependence and quit attempts, susceptibility to...

OBJECTIVES Smoking prevalence is slow to reduce among Indigenous Australians of reproductive age. We analysed the relationships between age of smoking initiation, recalled initiation influences and self-assessment of smoking risks in Aboriginal smokers. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A community-based cross-sectional survey of Aboriginal smokers aged 18-45 years (N=121; 58 men) was undertak...

AIMS To investigate the association between frequency of visiting shops and noticing of tobacco point-of-sale (PoS) displays and the development of susceptibility to smoking, or smoking uptake, in secondary school students. DESIGN Two surveys of a school based cohort study carried out in 2011 and 2012. SETTINGS Nottinghamshire, UK. PARTICIPANTS A total of 2270 children aged 11-16 years fr...

OBJECTIVE The authors' goal was to study presynaptic dopamine activity in smoking and nonsmoking human subjects in vivo. METHOD [(18)F]Fluorodopa ([(18)F]DOPA) uptake K(i) values in the basal ganglia of nine smoking and 10 nonsmoking healthy men were measured with positron emission tomography. RESULTS Significantly higher [(18)F]DOPA uptake was observed in both the putamen (average 17.3% hi...

Providing smokers with personal genetic test results indicating increased lung cancer risk may increase uptake of effective smoking cessation services. Using the internet may increase reach and enable real-time assessment of how people process genetic risk information away from the clinic setting. We therefore explored smokers' responses to Web-delivered GSTM1 genetic test results indicating hi...

BACKGROUND Developing countries are at high risk of epidemic increases in tobacco smoking, but the extent of this problem is not clearly defined because few collect detailed smoking data. We have surveyed tobacco smoking in the Ashanti region of Ghana, a rapidly developing African country with a long-established tobacco industry. METHODS We took a random sample of 30 regional census enumerati...

The relationship between regular smoking behavior and the smoking behavior of parents, siblings and friends was investigated using data from the Netherlands Twin Register. Cross-sectional analyses of data of 3906 twins showed significant associations between smoking behavior of the participant and smoking behavior of co-twin, additional brothers, parents of the same sex as the participant and f...

smoking behavior of parents, siblings and friends was investigated using data from the Netherlands Twin Register. Cross-sectional analyses of data of 3906 twins showed significant associations between smoking behavior of the participant and smoking behavior of co-twin, additional brothers, parents of the same sex as the part icipant and friends. Those variables, together with age, explained 47%...