Preventing smoking uptake among adolescents - A primary prevention initiative for chronic lung disease in India

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Smoking tobacco is the largest avoidable cause of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a range of other pulmonary disorders, and preventing the uptake and perpetuation of tobacco use is therefore crucial to reducing the global burden of chronic lung disease. Tobacco consumption is increasing in India, and as a large potential future market for tobacco products the country is vulnerable to aggressive marketing and promotion by the tobacco industry. This proposed project aims to identify and understand environmental factors that increase the risk of adolescents starting to smoke tobacco, with the aim of informing interventions that can reduce the number of new tobacco smokers and ultimately prevent chronic lung disease in the future. We will also investigate current attitudes to tobacco control policy implementation from stakeholders at local and national levels, to identify obstacles to more extensive implementation of anti-smoking policies. To ensure that our findings can be used to maximum effect they will be shared with all relevant stakeholders promoting public health in India; our findings are also likely to be directly relevant to smoking prevention in other low and middle-income countries.