FEB/MAR 2005
Volume 11 - No. 1
Research Activities at a Featured Program
SRNT Newsletter
February/March 2005, Volume 11, Number 1
Research Activities at a Highlighted Program:
The Pacific Rim TTURC
For the past five years, researchers at the Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (TTURC) at the University of Southern California have explored a wide range of factors affecting tobacco use and its prevention among the ethnically diverse youth of California, Hawaii, and Mainland China. These factors included cultural, social, psychological, and environmental influences that affect smoking in this young population.
With the recent renewal of support from the National Institutes of Health, the center, now known as the Pacific Rim TTURC (PR TTURC), has expanded its research into "how genes and the social, physical, and cultural environments interact to determine a person's use of and, possibly, eventual addiction to tobacco and alcohol," according to C. Anderson Johnson, director and principal investigator of the center and a member of SRNT. Dr. Johnson adds, "This research will help us develop more effective tobacco and alcohol control programs for a variety of environmental and cultural settings and individual characteristics."
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(l. to r.) C. Anderson Johnson, director and principal investigator of the Pacific Rim TTURC; Jennifer Unger and Gary Swan, co-principal investigators of the center |
The Pacific Rim TTURC will focus on adolescents in China and the U.S. and will build upon research conducted by its predecessor center during its 1999-2004 funding period. Scientific disciplines represented in the Pacific Rim TTURC include social, developmental, community, and cultural psychology; behavioral genetics; neuropharmacogentics; molecular biology; statistical genetics; health policy research; and biobehavioral ethics.
"Smoking-related diseases kill more than 400,000 people in the United States every year," Johnson said. "In China, the annual toll is nearly 800,000, with the numbers expected to soar as women, who traditionally smoked far less than men, take up the habit and as Chinese youth begin to experiment with tobacco at increasingly earlier ages. So the need for tobacco use research along the Pacific Rim is greater than ever."
Among the new Center's three major projects is a study of substance use by 600 adolescent twin pairs in Southern California and another 600 in Qingdao, China. It will try to quantify the nature of environmental influences and how they interact with genetic sources of variation in smoking-related behaviors. "This emphasis is unique among twin studies of tobacco use and represents a fusion of behavioral genetics with a social/cultural/environmental perspective," Johnson said.
A second project will investigate why school- and community-based smoking prevention curricula work in some situations and not in others. It will do so by studying the effects that a student's cultural/environmental context and dispositional characteristics — particularly hostility and depression — have on substance use uptake and progression, and how that influences the effectiveness of prevention and cessation programs.
The third study focuses on genetic factors responsible for hostility, depression, and other dispositional attributes and their role in tobacco and alcohol use and their prevention. It hypothesizes that genetically based dispositional characteristics may have a significant influence on an individual's progression toward increased smoking and on his or her responsiveness to tobacco control intervention and prevention programs. Researchers will examine the DNA of adolescents who have already completed detailed surveys about their smoking, personality characteristics, and social relationships in an attempt to identify some of the genes that are associated with smoking and personality.
Research Results
The Center's work is made possible by research findings and professional relationships developed during TTURC's first five years. Among the research results from that period:
- Findings from two USC TTURC trials, one in China and one in California, indicated that social
influences interventions were more effective in preventing progression to higher levels of
smoking than in preventing experimentation among never-smokers. In addition, the TTURC
smoking prevention curricula were more effective among students with particular personality
characteristics. Adolescents high in hostility and depression benefited from social
influences across cultural contexts, whereas those low in these characteristics did not.
- The Center's collaborations with investigators at the University of California Irvine TTURC
indicated that personality characteristics such as depression and hostility were risk factors
for smoking among Caucasian but not Asian youth. In contrast, smoking among Asian
adolescents appeared to be more dependent on the social context.
- Researchers found that broad racial/ethnic categories used in national-level health surveys in
the U.S. can obscure important health behavior differences between immigrants from
different countries and between first- and second-generation immigrants.
- A study compared three ways of organizing study groups and assigning student leaders to them to
deliver a smoking prevention program. The most effective groups were those organized by a method
using social networking data: Each student was assigned to work with a peer group leader he or she
had personally nominated. This was one of the first studies to demonstrate the use of social network
data to design a health promotion intervention.
- Researchers found that adolescents have an almost 90 percent greater chance of becoming smokers within a year of their parents or guardians losing their jobs than young people whose families haven't suffered this blow.
PR TTURC is one of seven Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA). It operates through the Institute for Health Promotion & Disease Prevention Research (IPR) in the Keck School of Medicine at USC. Johnson is the director of IPR, which celebrates its 25th anniversary next summer.
Jeff Baskin is the Communications Director of the Pacific Rim Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center at the University of Southern California.