Study Links Smoking to Anxiety Disorders
C H I C A G O, Nov. 7 -- A study suggests teen smokers are prone to anxiety disorders in adulthood, adding to a growing body of research implicating cigarette use as a cause rather than a result of emotional upheaval.
Confounding the conventional wisdom, the study of nearly 700adolescents found that those with disorders such as generalizedanxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia — fear of public places — were not more likely to take up smoking as adults.
On the contrary, those disorders were more common in adults whohad smoked heavily as teens.
Nicotine Upsets Nervous System?
Teens who smoked 20 or more cigarettes daily were more than 15times more likely to develop panic disorder as adults, nearly seventimes more likely to become agoraphobic and more than five timesmore likely to develop generalized anxiety disorder than teens whosmoked less or not at all.
The findings were published in Wednesday’s Journal of theAmerican Medical Association. They follow a study in October’sissue of the journal Pediatrics suggesting that smoking may be acause of depression in teens.
The authors of both studies theorize that nicotine may upset thecentral nervous system. Smoking’s damaging effect on the body’sability to use oxygen may also play a role, said the authors of theanxiety study, led by researcher Jeffrey Johnson at ColumbiaUniversity.
Johnson and colleagues interviewed 688 teens age 16 on averagein 1985-86, and again in 1991-93, when the participants were 22 onaverage.
The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Healthand the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
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