JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
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The warning on tobacco advertisements was required by the federal government, presumably as a health message to educate the public about the risks associated with tobacco use. Despite its potential public health role, there have been few published studies on the effectiveness of these warnings as a health message. The present study used well-accepted market research methods to examine adolescent viewing of tobacco advertisements. ⋯ Following the advertisement viewing, participants were asked to identify the observed warnings within a list that included other simulated warnings. Subjects did only slightly better than random guessing in this test of recognition. Using market research criteria, the federally mandated warning must be viewed as an ineffective public health message in so far as adolescents are concerned.
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Trends in the prevalence, initiation, and cessation of cigarette smoking are reported for the US population using weighted and age-standardized data from seven National Health Interview Surveys (1974 to 1985). The decline in prevalence was linear, with the prevalence for men decreasing at 0.91 percentage points per year to 33.5% in 1985 and the prevalence for women decreasing at 0.33 percentage points per year to 27.6% in 1985. For whites the rate of decline (percentage points per year) was 0.57, to 29.4% in 1985, and for blacks the decline was 0.67, to 35.6% in 1985. ⋯ Smoking initiation decreased among young men (-1.03), while it remained about the same in young women (+0.11). Initiation decreased at a more rapid rate in blacks (-1.02) than in whites (-0.35). We conclude that smoking prevalence is decreasing across all race-gender groups, although at a slower rate for women than men, and that differences in initiation, more than cessation, are primarily responsible for the converging of smoking prevalence rates among men and women.