A National Institutes of Health grant will help a Wayne State University School of Medicine researcher and his collaborator study the effectiveness of programs designed to curb adolescent smoking, and predict how well such future efforts may work.

Xianguang Chen, M.D., Ph.D., is the principal investigator for “Measuring cigarette smoking behavior progression with cross sectional data,” a study funded by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Drug Abuse. Dr. Chen has secured a four-year, $857,852 grant for the study.

Dr. Chen is an associate professor and researcher in the Prevention Research Center in the Carman and Ann Adams Department of Pediatrics. Established in 2003, the Pediatrics Prevention Research Center’s main research focus is to reduce health disparities in both domestic and international settings. These areas of research include HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse, pediatric obesity and treatment adherence among children with chronic diseases such as diabetes and asthma.

He will collaborate with Feng Lin, Ph.D., of the Wayne State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, on this research.

“The purpose of the project is to develop a new analytical method by adapting a mathematical model from engineering, and then use the new method to investigate the progression of adolescent smoking behavior in the United States from 1990 to 2005,” Dr. Chen explained. “Despite several decades of tobacco control efforts, particularly since the 1990s, one in every five adolescents now still smokes, far away from the 16 percent goal set forth by Healthy People 2010. To address this gap, current tobacco control strategies must be improved based on new data.”

Healthy People 2010 is a set of national health objectives hoped to be achieved by the first decade of the century. The effort builds on initiatives and research pursued over the past two decades. Developed through a consortium of agencies, Healthy People 2010 was established based on scientific knowledge and was developed to measure programs. The initiative has two main goals: to help increase life expectancy and improve quality of life, and to eliminate health disparities among population segments.

First, Dr. Chen and Dr. Lin will establish a new analytical method for behavioral research by adopting a mathematical model from engineering and system control. They will then use that method to analyze 16 years of national data collected through the National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 1990 to 2005. They hope that new analysis will provide “evidence on dynamics and responses” of teen smoking in the United States to a number of key tobacco control activities at national and state levels, including tobacco taxation, school- and community-based behavioral intervention, anti-tobacco marketing, and legal restrictions on tobacco sales and use. Using the model, the pair will predict future smoking patterns and numbers by simulating different tobacco control scenarios.

Dr. Chen hopes the findings from the prediction analysis can be used to inform tobacco control decision-making at national and state levels to optimize current tobacco control strategies in an effort to speed up the effect of current tobacco control and to support tobacco control goal-setting for the next decade of Health People 2020.

Before joining the School of Medicine in 2003, Dr. Chen received funding from the state of California to assess adolescent smoking at the state level using traditional methods in the preventive medicine field. That study expanded his previous research by adapting methods from engineering field to analyze national data.