New study findings suggest that adolescents are indeed influenced by antismoking ads on television that use graphic images about death and disease and expose the tobacco industry’s marketing practices.

Such “truth” ads have been instrumental in decreasing the prevalence of smoking among young people in the US, researchers report.

“This study showed that the campaign was associated with substantial declines in youth smoking and has accelerated recent declines in youth smoking prevalence,” write Dr. Matthew C. Farrelly and his colleagues in the American Journal of Public Health.

The “truth” campaign was initiated in February 2000 by the American Legacy Foundation as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement between the tobacco industry and 46 states. Rather than relying on overt antismoking messages, the campaign uses “hard-hitting ads that show at-risk youths rejecting tobacco and that reveal deceptive tobacco industry marketing tactics,” the researchers write.

To gauge the effect of the campaign, Farrelly and his team analyzed responses from about 50,000 junior and senior high students who were asked about their frequency of smoking during the past 30 days. All of the study participants were involved in the Monitoring the Future survey and were surveyed each spring from 1997 through 2002.

In 1997, 28 percent of the young people - including 19 percent of 8th graders, 29.8 percent of 10th graders and 36.5 percent of 12th graders - reported having smoked during the past 30 days.

By 1999, shortly before the start of the “truth” campaign, the overall proportion of youth smokers dropped to 25.3 percent, and by 2002, two years after the campaign was launched, smoking prevalence was down to 18 percent, the investigators report.

The truth campaign alone accounted for 22 percent of the drop in teen smoking between 1999 and 2002 and helped accelerate the decline between 2000 and 2002, according to Farrelly and his team.

“We found that youth smoking rates declined faster in the two years after the launch of the ‘truth’ campaign and that smoking rates declined faster in areas of the country where youth were exposed to a greater number of truth commercials,” Farrelly told Reuters Health.

Farrelly is a program director at RTI International’s Center for Health Promotion Research, a non-profit organization based in North Carolina.

“As a result of the truth campaign, there were 300,000 fewer young smokers by 2002 than there would have been had the campaign never existed,” Farrelly said.

Eighth graders, in particular, showed the greatest decline in smoking - a 45 percent drop from 1997 to 2002, the report indicates. In contrast, smoking among twelfth graders decreased by 27 percent during the same period.

The campaign did not seem to affect other risky behaviors among the youth, such as alcohol drinking during the past month or binge drinking during the past two weeks - a finding that suggests that “‘truth’ campaign exposure is not spuriously correlated with other prevention efforts,” the researchers write.

Based on the success of the truth ads, similar campaigns may be effective in reducing the prevalence of other risky behaviors, according to Farrelly.

“I do think that many of the basic concepts underlying the campaign’s approach (if not the ads themselves) are very relevant to other prevention campaigns,” he said.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear if the antismoking campaign will continue. “The primary source of funding for the campaign has come from the Master Settlement Agreement between states and major tobacco companies,” Farrelly explained. “This source of funding has run out and unless the American Legacy Foundation is able to secure additional funding, the campaign’s future is uncertain despite its success.”

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, March 2005.