Teen Anxiety Depression, Smoking Cause Anxiety?
Q: 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
700 adolescents found that those with disorders such as
generalized anxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia — fear of
public places — were not more likely to take up smoking as
adults.
A:On the contrary, those disorders were more common in adults
who had smoked heavily as teens.
Nicotine Upsets Nervous System?
Teens who smoked 20 or more cigarettes daily were more than 15
times more likely to develop panic disorder as adults, nearly
seven times more likely to become agoraphobic and more than
five times more likely to develop generalized anxiety disorder than
teens who smoked less or not at all.
The findings were published in Wednesday’s Journal of the
American Medical Association. They follow a study in October’s
issue of the journal Pediatrics suggesting that smoking may be a
cause of depression in teens.
The authors of both studies theorize that nicotine may upset
the central nervous system. Smoking’s damaging effect on the
body’s ability to use oxygen may also play a role, said the
authors of the anxiety study, led by researcher Jeffrey Johnson at
Columbia University.
Smoking is NOT a good idea, and its doubly not a good idea if you
have anxiety, but I would treat this with caution.
It could equally be that kids use smoking to unconsciously treat the
beginnings of their still unrecognised anxiety/depression. Tobacco
smoke does have MAOI (antidepressant) properties and in the
immediate term does seem to reduce