A study of sixth graders in Maryland found that more than a third of them had contemplated or tried smoking by the end of the school year.

That bad news comes in a study in the current issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior. Researchers from the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development surveyed the students in the fall and spring of the school year. The students were classified into five stages: those who had never smoked; those who intended to smoke at some future time; those who had tried a cigarette, but not recently; those who had experimented with cigarettes by smoking once or twice in the past 30 days; and those who were current smokers. Between fall and spring of the school year, the number of those who had never smoked declined from 84 percent to 65 percent. Those who said they intended to smoke increased from 9 percent to 16 percent. Students who had tried smoking increased from 3 percent to 8 percent, experimenters increased from 2 percent to 6 percent and current smokers increased from 2 percent to 6 percent. The study found children who rated themselves as intenders in the fall were three times more likely than those who never smoked to try, experiment or actually smoke a cigarette by the spring. There were more girls than boys (86 percent versus 81 percent) rated as having never smoked in the fall. But by spring, those number had dropped to 63 percent compared to 67 percent of boys. The study also found that white students were twice as likely as black students to smoke. Students who had greater social skills, higher parental expectations about smoking and closer parental supervision were less likely to take dangerous steps down the path to smoking, the study authors note.

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