According to a new study, smoking prevention rules implemented in school reduce the number of young people who will later become smokers.
Smoking in known to cause more than five million deaths every year and according to scientists, this number is predicted to rise by 2030. To tackle this problem at the elementary level, schools have implemented many smoke prevention rules. However, a lot of speculation has been raised regarding how effective these rules are.
Addressing these speculations, a study was conducted and later published in The Cochrane Library. Researchers found that smoking prevention rules implemented in school reduce the number of young people who will later become smokers.
"This review is important because there are no other comprehensive reviews of world literature on school-based smoking prevention programmes," said Julie McLellan, one of the authors of the review based at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford in Oxford, U.K. "The main strength of the review is that it includes a large number of trials and participants. However, over half were from the US, so we need to see studies across all areas of the world, as well as further studies analysing the effects of interventions by gender."
The study was conducted on data from 134 studies in 25 different countries, which involved a total of 428,293 young people aged 5-18. Of these, 49 studies reported smoking behavior in those who had never previously smoked. The researchers focused on this group because it offered the clearest indication of whether smoking interventions prevent smoking.
Although there were no significant effects within the first year, in studies with a longer follow-up, the number of smokers was significantly lower in the groups targeted by smoking interventions than in the control group.
