Stop Smoking Way

NEW YORK Suspicious-minded readers will wonder what vices teenagers are indulging in to take up the slack. Others will simply be pleased by newly released research from the Monitoring the Future project, based at the University of Michigan, finding that the incidence of teenage cigarette smoking is near record lows.

Based on surveys of students in grades 8, 10 and 12, “monthly prevalence” of smoking (i.e., smoking at all in the 30 days before being questioned) fell from 13.6 percent in 2007 to 12.6 percent this year. The monthly prevalence was 7 percent among 8th graders, 12 percent among 10th graders and 20 percent among 12th graders.

NEW YORK — In girls, depression, anxiety, and smoking may inhibit bone development during the critical bone growth phase of adolescence, study findings suggest.

Failure to obtain maximal bone density during adolescence, when nearly 40 to 50 percent of bone mass or density is attained in girls, leaves “a deficit in the bone bank,” Dr. Lorah D. Dorn told Reuters Health.

This may increase vulnerability to late life skeletal bone loss and brittleness known as osteoporosis, said Dorn of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio.

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway Wednesday announced that he has joined with 46 other attorneys general in an agreement with Shell Oil Products U.S. and its joint venture Motiva Enterprises LLC to reduce sales of cigarettes to minors.

Shell and Motiva supply gasoline through approximately 14,000 gas stations in the United States. Many of these gas stations include independently-operated convenience stores that sell a multitude of items, including tobacco products. Shell and Motiva have agreed to adopt procedures through their franchise agreements that are designed to reduce sales of cigarettes to minors.