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Study Shows Environment Plays Big Role in Women Starting to Smoke |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Researchers have long known that reasons for smoking include social pressure and other environmental factors, as well as genetic factors based on results of previous twin studies. Now a more comprehensive study of twins by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) has provided a better understanding of these complex influences. They found that women are far more likely than men to start smoking because of environmental factors, whereas genetic factors appear to play a larger role in influencing men to start smoking. However, the study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, found no differences between the sexes in factors related to continued smoking, which appeared to be strongly influenced by genetics. With regard to starting smoking, there was a significant difference between men and women, said Ann Hamilton, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and lead author on the study. This may indicate that the heritable effect in men could be overestimated or able to be affected by environmental factors." But when it comes to continuing to smoke, the study found little difference in causal factors between males and females or between those who communicated with each other often and those who did not.
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