Best practices in smoking prevention in schools

Abstract

The biggest risk that children and adolescents face when they start smoking is to become addicted to tobacco, often for life, and come later to suffer from many diseases caused by smoking (lung cancer, COPD, heart attacks, among others). Recent studies have shown that children become addicted to nicotine more easily than adults and with such low quantities of tobacco which had never before been studied (smoke two cigarettes a day for four to six weeks). The researchers also found that girls are more easily addicted to nicotine than boys. Apart from the health problems associated tobacco use in adolescence is a very prevalent problem in expansion, especially in females, but vulnerable. To halt the progression of the smoking epidemic is necessary to understand its etiology, ie, understand when, where and why children and teenagers become smokers. In light of the answers to these questions may draw up more rational interventions to solve the problem. The purpose of this article is to help clarify the etiology of tobacco use and analyze the contribution that school and family physicians can take to control the spread of smoking.