Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of premature, preventable death in the United States. Each year smoking causes an average of 438,000 deaths from cancer, heart disease, stroke, and lung disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.
For years the conventional wisdom in smoking research was that smokers don't show signs of daily cigarette addiction until adulthood. But at the School of Nursing, Professor Carla Storr, ScD, RN, is shedding light on the fact that nicotine addiction can start well before smokers are old enough to legally buy cigarettes.
Using data from large-scale national surveys, Storr was able to show in a study published in 2008 in Nicotine and Tobacco Research that there is a small proportion of youth, who, once they start smoking, move on to meeting dependence criteria very rapidly—within a two-year period.
"Quantity and frequency of smoking is not always synonymous with meeting the definition for being addicted," explains Storr, whose research focuses on mental health aspects of addictive behavior.
Another one of her studies, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2004, showed a link between children with behavior problems in the primary grades and early tobacco addiction.
For that study, she looked at longitudinal data collected by Johns Hopkins researchers from a cohort of more than 2,000 Baltimore City elementary school students, starting in 1983.
Storr found that students whose first grade teachers classified them as having behavior problems were more likely to start smoking early and become dependent. The results indicate a need for much earlier interventions, says Storr, who is working on a follow-up study with the Baltimore cohort—now in their 30s.
"We wouldn't have to worry about getting people to cease smoking as adults," says Storr," if they never started to begin with."
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