Smoking

Secret Weapon for Quit-Smoking Campaigns: Pets

Secret Weapon for Quit-Smoking Campaigns: Pets

Secret Weapon for Quit-Smoking Campaigns: Pets

Rima Nakkash, professor in George Mason University's College of Public Health, and University of Florida colleague Ramzi Salloum lead a five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute to compare the effectiveness of evidence-based tobacco treatment interventions in Lebanon. 

Youth smoking remains a significant public health problem in the U.S. and in Virginia. Hong Xue, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy, is conducting a study of youth smoking and prevention on the effects of policy and prevention strategies on the use of conventional and e-cigarettes in Virginia adolescents.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Associate Professor Hong Xue and Professors Alison Cuellar and Lawrence Cheskin and colleagues at George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services examined associations between the amount of time spent on specific social media sites and the use of both e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes.  

While most of the social media platforms reviewed in the study showed no significant association with vaping, Xue and his colleagues did find that college-age e-cigarette users who spent more time on Snapchat did have a higher prevalence of lifetime e-cigarette use as well as an increased frequency of e-cigarette use in the past 30 days.

College-age e-cigarette users who are occasional or regular vapers spend an average of just over two hours a day on Snapchat, according to the study. Non-users, on the other hand, spend less than an hour each day on the app. The study also found that each extra hour on Snapchat was associated with a 4.61 percent increase in likelihood of lifetime e-cigarette use

Rima Nakkash is a Professor in the Global and Community Health Department. Nakkash is a leading international scholar in tobacco control research in prevention and policy evaluation.

The Problem with Flavored Cigarettes

George Mason University study finds 2009 U.S. Food and Drug Administration flavored cigarette ban reduced smoking by underage youth by 43% and young adults by 27%.

Dr. Hong Xue is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy. His primary research interests are in health economics, nutritional epidemiology, systems science and modeling, (childhood) obesity, mHealth, and big data and machine learning.