The appeal of smoking for children and teens may be tied at least in part to their race or ethnicity, a recent U.S. study suggests. Plenty of previous research has found disparities in smoking habits, with white and Hispanic youth more likely to start smoking and develop a daily habit than black kids, said lead study author Sherine El-Toukhy, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Black children who start smoking by age 14, though, are more likely to carry the habit into adulthood. “The current study looks at smoking susceptibility, which precedes smoking behavior,” El-Toukhy, of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, said by email. To assess susceptibility, researchers looked at survey data collected from 1999 to 2014 from almost 144,000 non-smoking youth aged 9 to 21. Children who said they had tried even a single cigarette were excluded from the study. All of the kids were asked how likely it was that they would try cigarettes soon, within the next year, or if a friend offered them one to smoke.

From 1999 to 2007, across racial and ethnic groups, roughly 21 percent of the surveyed youth appeared to be susceptible to smoking based on their responses to questions about whether they planned to try cigarettes in the future, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics. That percentage crept up to about 23 percent in 2014. Susceptibility steadily climbed for Hispanic youth, from 22 percent in 1999 to 28 percent in 2014. During the study period, Hispanic children appeared to be as much as 67 percent more susceptible to smoking than white kids. Hispanic youth were most likely to be drawn to cigarettes around ages 12 and 16, the study also found. “We pinpoint specific ages at which youth who have never tried cigarettes are more likely to be susceptible to smoking and highlight differences in smoking susceptibility by race and ethnicity,” El-Toukhy said.