On-screen smoking may turn teens on to cigarettes

Youth who watch a lot of movies with cigarette-smoking characters - whether the films are rated R or PG-13 - are more likely to start smoking themselves, researchers suggest in a new study out Monday.

The report's lead author said the finding supports the idea that it's the smoking itself - and not the sex, profanity or violence that may go along with it in certain films - that influences youth to take up the habit.

"Movie smoking seems to be just as impactful if it's packaged in a PG-13 movie as opposed to an R movie," said Dr. James Sargent, from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

"I really think it's a ‘cool' factor. The more they see it, the more they start to see ways that (smoking) might make them seem more movie-star," he told Reuters Health - even if the effect is subconscious.

Sargent and his colleagues counted how many times a character was seen smoking in each of over 500 box-office hits from recent years. Then, they asked 6,500 U.S. kids ages 10 to 14 which of a random selection of 50 of those movies they'd watched.

The average "dose" of movie smoking was 275 scenes from films rated PG-13 and 93 scenes from R movies, the researchers reported in Pediatrics.

And in three subsequent interviews with the same kids, those who had watched smoking-heavy movies were more likely to pick up the habit themselves. For each extra 500 smoking shots reported in their initial survey, youth were 33 to 49 percent more likely to try cigarettes over the next two years.

The effect of on-screen smoking was not significantly different for PG-13 and R films. And because kids tend to see more PG-13 flicks, Sargent's team calculated that if smoking automatically earned an R rating, the number of youngsters who try cigarettes would drop by 18 percent.

"At this point, it is established that exposure to smoking in movies is a potent risk factor for actually taking up smoking, especially when the exposures are early," Dr. Brian Primack, head of the Program for Research on Media and Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told Reuters Health in an email.

"This study goes a step further and suggests that taking smoking out of all PG-13 movies could have a palpable effect on the impact of smoking in the U.S.," he added.

Still, another researcher not involved in the new study said he's not sure if eliminating smoking from all non-R movies "is the magic answer."

Matthew Farrelly, who studies smoking at the scientific institute RTI in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, said the study is a step in the right direction. But he wasn't sure the researchers could totally discount the influence of violence and profanity in movies on kids' decision to try smoking just by looking at ratings.

"I'm hoping that someone can disentangle smoking in the movies from other content that might appeal to youth to really firm up this relationship," he said.