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Rutland Area Prevention Coalition |
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Mobilizing the community in the prevention of substance abuse through education and promotion of healthy lifestyle choices. |
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Tobacco Articles |
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WINTER, 2009 Cigarette Cravings Impair Concentration (JoinTogether.org) Research Summary Cigarette cravings increase the likelihood that a person will lose their train of thought while performing a cognitive task, UPI reported Dec. 15. Craving interrupts meta-awareness, which is the ability to assess one's own thoughts, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh. Michael Sayette and colleagues studied 44 smokers, most of whom smoked about one pack a day. Subjects were asked to stop smoking for at least six hours prior the study. Some were then placed in a 'low-crave' group and allowed to smoke during the study. The others were placed in a 'crave-condition' group and were not allowed to smoke. Both groups were asked to read more than 30 pages of Tolstoy's book, "War and Peace" on a computer. The participants pressed a certain key every time they found themselves "zoning out." The study found that the people craving cigarettes reported three times as many mind-wandering episodes as the participants in the low-crave group. They were also less likely to try to catch themselves zoning out. The findings are slated to appear in the January 2010 issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Waterpipe Smoking More Dangerous Than Cigarettes (JoinTogether.org) Research Summary Smoking from a hookah, or waterpipe, has become trendy among college-age Americans, in part because of the belief that hookahs are a safer alternative to smoking. In fact, the opposite is true, as a new study demonstrates. Reuters reported Dec. 7 that researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the American University of Beirut studied a group of adult volunteers, comparing a 45-minute session of smoking from a waterpipe to the same period of time smoking a single cigarette. The research demonstrated that hookahs delivered three times more carbon monoxide and about the same amount of nicotine as cigarettes. Hookahs also exposed users to 40 percent more smoke by volume than cigarettes, researchers found. "This study can be used to dispel the myth that waterpipe tobacco smoking is a less lethal way of smoking tobacco," said co-author Thomas Eissenberg, Ph.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University. The study was published in the December 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
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