Young people who watch movies in which actors smoke a lot are three times more likely to take up the habit than those exposed to less smoking on screen, a new study of American adolescents suggests.
The study, published Tuesday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal of London, provides the strongest evidence to date that smoking depicted in movies encourages adolescents to start smoking, according to some experts. Others said they remain unconvinced.
The investigators concluded that 52 percent in the study who smoked started entirely because of seeing movie stars smoke on screen.
However, Paul Levinson, a media theorist at Fordham University in New York, noted there are many reasons people start smoking and the study could not accurately determine how important each factor is.
The research, conducted by scientists at Dartmouth Medical School, involved 2,603 children from Vermont and New Hampshire schools who were ages 10 to 14 at the start of the study in 1999 and had never smoked a cigarette at the time they were recruited.
