A research team has published a study indicating that advertising sponsored by tobacco companies to dissuade young people from smoking may actually have the reverse effect, the Portland Business Journal reported Dec. 12.

The study also indicates that industry-sponsored prevention ads aimed at parents often have harmful effects on teenagers and may encourage them to smoke as well.

"We suspected this the minute we saw the kind of ads the tobacco companies were creating," said Brian Flay, a professor in the Department of Public Health at Oregon State University. "Their objective is to get customers, not to stop customers from finding them."

The study involved nine researchers from the Bridging the Gap policy research program who combined survey data from more than 100,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 on smoking-related beliefs and behaviors with Nielsen Media Research data on exposure to smoking-related ads in the largest U.S. media markets between 1999 and 2002.

Results from the study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Cancer Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, are published in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.