Teen smoking 'is linked to films'

Children who watch films with smoking scenes are three times more likely to smoke than those who watch films with non-smoking actors, a new study has claimed.

Researchers from the University of California said that the more children see actors smoking in films, the more likely they are to start smoking.

Conversely, children who watched films with very few smoking scenes were less inclined to smoke.

The research team found that eliminating smoking scenes from films reduced the likelihood of smoking in adolescents.

The study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics, is the first complete review of previous studies which claim there is a link between teen smoking and films.

Lead author Annemarie Charlesworth said: "The weight of dozens of studies, after controlling for all other known influences, shows the more smoking that kids see on screen, the more likely they are to smoke.

"This strong empirical evidence affects hundreds of thousands of families."

After reviewing the data on films and teen smoking, the research team found that US-made films have as many smoking scenes as they did in 1950, but that nowadays more scenes showing actors smoking are found in films geared towards young people.

The researchers examined the findings of 42 previous studies to come to the conclusion that cutting smoking scenes in films geared towards a younger market could reduce adolescent smoking.

Professor Stanton Glantz said: "This result indicates that lowering exposure by removing smoking from youth-marketed films will reduce the number of kids who start smoking.

"The science is in; getting smoking out of youth rated movies is the simplest and least expensive thing that can be done to reduce adolescent smoking."

The researchers found that films rarely depicted the negative consequences of smoking and usually made the high status characters, which kids would tend to idolise, smoke.

However, they did find that when teen audiences were shown anti-smoking adverts before watching a film, it helped counter the effect of any smoking that was shown later in the film.

A study by Southampton General Hospital found in a study that half of 14 to 16-year-olds had tried smoking.

The researchers said factors which made teens more likely to smoke included having a single parent or having parents and siblings who smoked.

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