"Smoking depicted in the movies is a primary reason children ages 10 to 14 try cigarettes, a study reports today.

The study, the first national one of its kind, finds that 38% of young smokers took up the habit because of tobacco use on the big screen. Researchers surveyed 532 movies and found smoking in 74% of them.

Authors say they interviewed more than 6,500 children across the country and considered 21 other factors that influence young people's smoking, such as television viewing and parental permissiveness, says James Sargent, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School.

At the beginning of the study, published in Pediatrics, researchers found that about 10% of kids in this age group smoked. Those who viewed the most tobacco use were more than 21/2 times as likely to start smoking as children who saw the least, according to the study."

"With a new study showing that exposure to on-screen smoking prompts many American adolescents to light up, attorneys general from 32 states want Hollywood to slap anti-smoking admonitions on all new DVDs.

They signed a letter sent this week to 10 movie studios asking executives to add anti-smoking public service announcements to all home-viewing releases that depict smoking.

'We're urging (studios) to do more,' said Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr., author of the letter.

'The industry's leaders are responsible Americans,' he said, 'and I'm sure they're just as concerned about the health of their children as the doctors are.'"

Don't let the camera angle fool you: that's no horse the Marlboro man is riding; it's a divorce lawyer. The advantage that tobacco companies find in family disintegration is all too apparent in a study recently published in Social Science & Medicine by a team of public health scholars at the University of Helsinki.

Parsing data collected in 2000 and 2001 from municipal employees in Helsinki, the Finnish researchers discern an unmistakable pattern: smoking is "clearly more common among lone parents than among married parents, even after adjusting for economic difficulties, socioeconomic status, and social relations." Thus, while only 15% of married mothers in this study smoked, 26% of single mothers did. Among fathers, 32% of the married fathers in the study smoked, compared to 48% of single fathers (though the researchers acknowledged that the number of single fathers in the study was "quite low").

Because their data indicate that men and women experiencing economic difficulties are especially likely to smoke (twice as likely as those not experiencing such difficulties) and because "economic difficulties are common in lone-parent households," the researchers expected the statistical tie between parents' marital status and their tobacco use to disappear after taking into account their financial distresses. The research, however, did not support this preconception.  "Contrary to our expectation," the researchers acknowledge, "adjusting for economic difficulties did not level off the association between smoking and lone parenthood." The data compel the researchers to conclude that for both mothers and fathers, "lone parenthood and economic difficulties are independently related to smoking."

The authors of the new study worry that while "social relations are generally considered positive to health," an unhealthy social pattern seems dominant within the social relations of single parents. "Particularly among lone parents," the researchers remark, "smoking seems to be an important part of social life." That is, the "social networks" of single parents actually appear "to encourage smoking." The social networks of married parents, on the other hand, do not foster such unhealthy habits.