Public Health

Cigar smoking "a new trend" among US college students

CHICAGO, Aug 10 (Reuters Health) - Close to half of US college students have used some form of tobacco within the past year, according to survey results published in the August 9th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

"College students are using tobacco products of all types at higher rates than we previously realized, and this includes a substantial use of cigars, which represents a new phenomenon or a new trend," Dr. Nancy A. Rigotti explained while presenting the survey results here at the 11th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.

Dr. Rigotti and colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, in Boston, asked of more than 14,000 students at 119 colleges across the nation about their use of noncigarette tobacco. Almost half of the respondents, 45.7%, reported using any form of tobacco in the past year, and 32.9% said that they had used tobacco within the past 30 days.

Twenty-eight percent of the college students said that within the past 30 days they had smoked cigarettes, 9% had smoked cigars (including 4% of women), 4% had used smokeless tobacco and 1% had smoked a pipe. More than half of tobacco users had used more than one form of tobacco in the past year.

More men, 37.9%, than women, 29.7%, reported tobacco use within the past 30 days. "The sex difference...is entirely attributable to a higher prevalence of noncigarette tobacco use among men," the research team comments in the journal. "Whether the gap between the sexes in noncigarette tobacco product use will follow the pattern of cigarettes and narrow in the future deserves to be monitored."

Dr. Rigotti noted that tobacco companies are paying more attention to young adults, and she urged public health experts to do the same. "Tobacco control efforts of the past decade have focused on kids. We've forgotten, in a way, the young adults," she said. "We've left them exposed to tobacco marketing efforts."

JAMA 2000;284:699-705.

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