UCI to Join Bid to Fight Smoking
Armed with $9.3 million in federal grant funds over five years, UC Irvine scientists will investigate why people take up smoking and why they cannot quit.
The bulk of the research in Orange County is part of a federal project that will focus on why teens and young adults begin to light up. UCI scientists will observe 100 local high school and college students to find out what behaviors and moods contribute to daily decisions to smoke.
UCI is one of seven universities around the nation participating in the $70-million research effort by the National Institutes of Health, with each team investigating a different aspect of tobacco use and nicotine addiction.
Unlocking the secrets behind adolescent smoking is at the heart of the effort to break the nation’s tobacco habit, said researchers, in part because more than 90% or adult smokers first try cigarettes before graduating from high school.
“The majority of adults have started to smoke before they are 18,” said Frances Leslie, professor of pharmacology at UCI’s College of Medicine. “We are interested in what factors make children smoke. Most try cigarettes at some point but only 20% become addicted and we want to know why.”
Another goal of the grants is to create a core of new tobacco research centers nationwide. In addition, work at the centers will be done across a wide range of academic disciplines to better understand how people get hooked on tobacco products, federal officials said.
For instance, at UCI the College of Medicine and the School of Social Ecology will be involved in the research. Among other projects, the social scientists will analyze how factors such as age and gender influence smoking habits, and the biological scientists will examine how nicotine alters hormones, neural communication and chemicals in the brain to create addiction, among other things.
“Tobacco use and nicotine addiction are such complex subjects that it will take a truly [cross-disciplinary] approach to understand the addiction and how to prevent tobacco use, particularly by teens and younger children,” said Allan I. Leshner of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which along with the National Cancer Institute is providing the funding. Both are part of NIH.
One key issue for researchers is to find out why it is easier for addicted adults to stop smoking than for adolescents, and why teens take up smoking at a much greater rate than adults.
Among the theories to be investigated is a belief that smoking is age-dependent and there is a factor that makes the young brain more susceptible to nicotine. “That would explain why fewer people start smoking as adults,” Leslie said.
Other parts of the puzzle concern gender and personality links to smoking. For instance, some scientists will explore suggestions that women smoke for different reasons than men.
“Data suggests women are possibly less addicted to nicotine itself, but like the cues associated with cigarettes,” she said, adding that there “may be a higher use of tobacco and sensitivity to nicotine among men who show a high degree of hostility” as a personality factor.
“We want to understand how both biological and cultural factors encourage them [youth] to smoke with the long term goal of developing good intervention.”
Other schools with the NIH grant funds are Brown, Yale, USC, Georgetown, and the universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The grants were announced last week, but the program itself already is underway.
As part of the research at UCI, social scientists will create an economic model that analyzes the financial costs of smoking on society and what the savings are if you can get someone to stop.
“Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death,” Leslie said. “In order to make good policy decisions, it is good to have research that can predict the result of good intervention.”
