Number of Russian Women Smokers Has Doubled Since Soviet Collapse

The number of Russian women who smoke has more than doubled since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to new research.

In 1992, seven per cent of women smoked, compared to almost 15 per cent by 2003. In the same period, the number of men who smoke has risen from 57 per cent to 63 per cent.

The researchers behind the study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, blame the privatisation of the previously state owned tobacco industry and the behaviour of the transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) for what they describe as a “very worrying increase.”

Between 1992 and 2000, TTCs such as Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International invested approximately $1.7 billion to gain a 60 percent share of the privatized Russian tobacco market.

Tobacco advertising had simply not existed in the Soviet era. Yet as soon as the TTCs were there, it was rampant, say researchers. By the mid 1990s it was estimated that half of all billboards in Moscow and three quarters of plastic bags in Russia carried tobacco advertising.

“There can be no doubt that the marketing tactics of Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and the like directly underpin this massive increase in smoking that spells disaster for health in Russia,” says Dr Anna Gilmore from the School for Health at the University of Bath, who carried out the study with academics from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and University College London, and has been researching tobacco control in the region for over seven years.

“Following privatisation of the tobacco industry, TTCs invested heavily in developing the market, promoting smoking as part of the new ‘western lifestyle’,” Gilmore says.

“They aggressively targeted women, young people and those living in cities with their marketing and distribution strategies. This is now directly reflected in the smoking patterns we are seeing. Until this point women in Russia had simply not smoked,” she adds.

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Cigarette Smoke And Alcohol Damage Hearts Worse As Combo

Tobacco smoke-filled air is bad for cardiovascular health, and drinking alcohol at the same time only makes it worse, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Testing the theory that moderate alcohol consumption provides some heart-protection benefits, the UAB team said it wanted to take the idea further and look at the effects of smoking and breathing second-hand smoke along with drinking.

They reported that mice exposed to smoky air in a laboratory enclosure and fed a liquid diet containing ethanol, the intoxicating ingredient in alcohol, had a 4.7-fold increase in artery lesions. That compares to mice who breathed filtered air and ate a normal solid diet.

Artery lesions are a common problem in heavy smokers and a key sign of advancing
cardiovascular disease. The results are published in the journal Free Radical Biology & Medicine.
The researchers reported mice solely exposed to the smoky air had a 2.3-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice who breathed filtered air. Mice solely fed a liquid diet containing ethanol had a 3.5-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice fed a normal diet.
The study points to a greater need to understand the negative biological impact of single or multiple risky behaviors, and the compounding effect of environmental hazards such as second-hand smoke, says Scott Ballinger, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Pathology and lead author on the study.

“Our study shows that exposure to cigarette smoke when combined with alcohol consumption caused the greatest degree of cardiovascular disease development compared to either action or exposure alone,” Ballinger says.

“Because moderate alcohol consumption is commonly thought to be cardioprotective, these findings are important for smokers and non-smokers alike in terms of what you should and should not do to protect their health,” says Shannon Bailey, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Environmental Health Sciences and a co-investigator on the study.

The mice experiments were performed over a five-week period. Blood-alcohol concentrations reached the equivalent of a 150-pound adult consuming 2 drinks per hour. Cigarette smoke exposure was similar to being in an automobile with a chain smoker with the windows closed.
In addition to measuring artery lesions in the study mice, the UAB team looked at other signs of advancing cardiovascular disease like DNA damage and oxidative stress in key heart tissues.

Like the artery lesions, these added measurements showed that taking in both smoky air and ethanol had the effect of basically nullifying any potential heart benefit from drinking alcohol by itself.

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Spiritual Beliefs, Practices May Help Smokers Quit

Unlike many traditional alcohol and drug dependence treatment programs, mainstream smoking cessation programs generally exclude spiritual practice and beliefs from the treatment process. But a study by Oregon Health & Science University Smoking Cessation Center researchers reveals many smokers are receptive to and may benefit from their own spiritual resources, when attempting to quit.

The study, believed to be the first to look at the potential use of spiritual resources for quitting in adult smokers, recently was published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

For decades, the OHSU research team encountered some patients in clinical practice who reported that in addition to the treatments provided by the team, they used personal spiritual beliefs and practices in their quit attempts. This led the team to question why spiritual resources were not part of mainstream tobacco dependence treatment programs.

"We theorized the absence of spiritual resources in smoking cessation programs may be due to perceived resistance from smokers or, until recently, the social acceptance of smoking, which may have prevented patients and providers from considering the health effects of tobacco dependence as life-threatening," says David Gonzales, principal investigator of the study, and co-director, OHSU Smoking Cessation Center, OHSU School of Medicine. "We know that smoking cessation medications coupled with behavioral interventions increase quit rates, but quitting is still difficult and some smokers need more support in order to quit successfully. We may be missing opportunities to assist these smokers."

Gonzales and colleagues discovered that women were more likely to report a spiritual practice or belief compared with men, but smokers of both sexes who smoked more than 15 cigarettes per day were more likely to be open to having their health care provider encourage them to use their own (the patient's) spiritual practice to assist in a quit attempt.

"Our findings suggest that although not all clinicians want to talk about spirituality with their patients, those who do feel comfortable doing so will likely find most patients who smoke are receptive. Asking smoking patients if they have a spiritual practice or belief may be important to their care," Gonzales explains.

Patient spirituality is becoming more mainstream in medicine and is accepted as integral to the treatment of many medical conditions, especially cancer, Gonzales says. Surveys show patients would like their providers to discuss spirituality related to their health care. Along with this opportunity there is a challenge for health care providers to respect spiritual beliefs and practices that may be different from their own. Further investigation and program development on how to include spirituality in mainstream tobacco dependence treatment is warranted, he and his team concluded.

To conduct this research, Gonzales and colleagues surveyed 104 current smokers, aged 18 or older and not attempting to quit, in smoking areas outside building on the OHSU Marquam Hill Campus. Study participants were equally male and female, on average 38 years old, and had smoked about 17 cigarettes a day for approximately 21 years. The anonymous surveys included questions about smoking behaviors, and spiritual practices and beliefs.

Of the 104 participants, 92 had some history of using spiritual resources, and of those, 78 percent believed that using those resources when making a quit attempt could be helpful.

Seventy-seven percent believed having treatment staff encourage the use of spiritual resources to help them quit could be beneficial.

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