Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco
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As Rich and Xiao suggested, cigarette sharing and gifting play an important role in China's smoking epidemic. Understanding the cultural roots, history, and impacts of such practices should be emphasized in tobacco control efforts. "Tobacco as a social currency" is a consequence of the tobacco industry usurping traditional values and cultural customs to make cigarette gifting acceptable, desirable, and socially reinforcing. The cigarettes-social reinforcement link created by the tobacco industry can be broken by deglamorizing smoking and cigarette gifting and by reinforcing alternative healthful behaviors. A behavioral ecological perspective, with an emphasis of understanding and engineering cultures, should guide future health promotion efforts to reduce smoking and other risk practices in China.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Enhanced didactic methods of smoking cessation training for medical students--a randomized study.
It is essential that medical students are adequately trained in smoking cessation. A web-based tobacco abstinence training program might supplement or replace traditional didactic methods. ⋯ Role playing and interaction with real patients are equally efficient and both more powerful learning tools than web-based learning with or without a lecture.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Reducing smoking in adolescents: cost-effectiveness results from the cluster randomized ASSIST (A Stop Smoking In Schools Trial).
School-based smoking prevention programmes can be effective, but evidence on cost-effectiveness is lacking. We conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis of a school-based "peer-led" intervention. ⋯ A peer-led intervention reduced smoking among adolescents at a modest cost. The intervention is cost-effective under realistic assumptions regarding the extent to which reductions in adolescent smoking lead to lower smoking prevalence and/or earlier smoking cessation in adulthood. The annual cost of extending the intervention to Year 8 students in all U.K. schools would be in the region of £38 million and could result in 20,400 fewer adolescent smokers.
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Oxidative stress is induced by both cigarette smoking and acute exercise. It has also been reported that exercise can induce plasma oxidative stress in young cigarette smokers. However, no previous report has demonstrated that exercise induces pulmonary oxidative stress in cigarette smokers. The aim of this study was to determine whether pulmonary oxidative stress is induced by maximal exercise in cigarette smokers as measured by reactive oxygen species generation and total antioxidant content. ⋯ These findings indicate that in cigarette smokers, maximal exercise induces pulmonary oxidative stress, which may lead to oxidative damage in the lungs.
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In the United Kingdom, with most marketing channels prohibited, packaging is one of the few remaining ways that tobacco companies can promote their products. ⋯ Packaging appears to both attract young people and mislead them about product strength and relative harm. Innovative pack construction (novel pack shape and method of opening) and the use of color are instrumental in these effects. The findings therefore suggest that any move to plain packaging should not only consider the benefits of removing branding (including color) but also of standardizing pack construction in terms of shape and method of opening.