The American Academy of Pediatrics has produced recommendations for tobacco counseling and believes pediatricians should be involved. Researchers provided a predictive tool that clinicians used in clinical and non-clinical settings to identify adolescents at risk of becoming daily smokers. The Nicotine Dependence in Teens (NDIT) Study, a prospective assessment of 1,293 adolescents, initially aged 12-13 years, recruited in ten secondary schools in Montreal, Canada in 1999, was used to compile the data. For five years, questionnaires were sent out every three months. Estimated coefficients from multivariable logistic models were used to create the prognosis tool. They used Bootstrap cross-validation to correct model overfitting. R2, the c-statistic, and the Hosmer-Lemeshow test were used to evaluate the models’ goodness-of-fit and predictive performance.
Age, ever smoked, ever needed a cigarette, parent(s) smoke, sibling(s) smoke, friend(s) smoke, and ever drank alcohol were all 7 factors in determining the 1-year and the 2-year chance of starting daily smoking. The models were characterized by a good fit and capacity to forecast. They converted into user-friendly tables to calculate the risk of daily smoking and add up the points for each item’s responses. The predictive tool for identifying kids at high risk of daily smoking could become a significant part of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy in the future.
Reference:bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2431-11-70
