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Objectives: Research identifying reliable and country-specific predictors of smoking is needed in order to develop effective adolescent smoking prevention programmes. The objective of this study was to assess the cognitive and socio-demographic factors associated with smoking onset among Romanian teenagers, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Methods: The data were obtained from a two-wave, one-year longitudinal study carried out among 316 senior high school non-smokers from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Questionnaires assessed smoking behaviour, attitudes, social influence, self-efficacy and intention regarding smoking (motivational variables) as well as different sociodemographic features. Results: The cross-sectional analyses showed that socio-demographics and motivational variables were strongly associated with smoking behaviour; the explained variance was 76%. The longitudinal analyses revealed that four variables explained 33% of the variance in change of status from non-smoking to regular smoking over a period of one year. Regular smoking onset after one year was predicted by baseline low self-efficacy in refraining from smoking in different situations, having more smoking friends and playing truant from school. Having a brother was a protective factor. Conclusion: The results suggest that smoking prevention programmes in Romania should strengthen self-efficacy beliefs and resistance against peer modelling and help Romanian young people to develop skills and action plans to cope with pressure to smoke and challenging situations.

Aim: The first goal of this study was to assess the prevalence of different health risk behaviours among Romanian young people. Next, the interrelationship between different health risk behaviours as well as age and gender differences with respect to health risk behaviours were examined. Subjects and methods: Self-administered questionnaires were completed by a sample of 1,598 junior high school students, senior high school students and university students from urban and rural areas of two counties of Romania. Results: The results showed that 31% of junior high school students, 59.7% of senior high school students and 64.8% of university students reported more than one risk behaviour. Many of the risk behaviours were likely to correlate with each other and the strongest correlation was found between smoking, alcohol-related behaviour and precocious sexual intercourse. Factor analysis revealed that among junior high school students all health risk behaviours loaded on one factor. In senior high school students and university students the risk behaviours split into two factors, based probably on their frequency and severity. Factor 1 comprised smoking, alcohol-related behaviours as well as precocious sexual intercourse, while factor 2 included less common behaviours: violence, delinquency and illicit drug use. No gender differences were observed regarding the relationship between health risk behaviours. Conclusion: The results stress the importance of developing prevention programmes among Romanian youth for the behaviours discussed. Further research is needed to identify how to best offer these programmes: as stand-alone programmes or as an integrated set of programmes and whether the same approach has to be taken for younger and older adolescents.

Background: The objective of this study was to assess cross-sectional and prospective relations between alcohol and tobacco use among Romanian adolescents, giving special attention to possible gender differences. Methods: The data were obtained from a two-wave 1-year longitudinal study carried out among 403 Romanian high school students aged 15–17 years (mean age 15.9; SD = 0.3). Questionnaires were used to assess smoking behaviour and alcohol use. Both behaviours were classified into two categories, that of adolescents who used the substance (at least once/month) and that of those who did not use the substance or used it less than monthly. Logistic regression was used to determine which substance was the best predictor of the subsequent use of the other substance. Results: Alcohol and cigarette use were found to be linked reciprocally and this interrelationship differed across genders. Among girls smoking predicted alcohol use better than the converse, while for the boys it was the other way around. Conclusion: It is important for future studies of adolescent substance use to systematically investigate the gender differences in the tobacco–alcohol relationship.

The goal of this study was to assess the effects of a school-based smoking prevention programme that used both a video and peer-led discussion groups among Romanian junior high school students aged 13-14 years. The programme embraced the social influence approach and concentrated on enhancing self-efficacy and the acquisition of cigarette refusal skills. Twenty schools were randomly assigned to the control and experimental conditions, resulting in 55 participating classes from the seventh grade (28 in the control group and 27 in the experimental group). Pretest and 9 months follow-up data on weekly smoking initiation and psychosocial variables were collected from 1071 students. Multilevel logistic regression analyses demonstrated a significant effect of the programme on adolescents' smoking behaviour after 9 months. At post-test, weekly smoking onset was 4.5 % in the experimental group versus 9.5% in the control group. Furthermore, the programme had significant effects on smoking-related beliefs. In the experimental group, this resulted in a more negative attitude towards smoking, increased social self-efficacy levels and a more negative intention towards smoking. These findings show that short-term effects of the smoking prevention programme can be realized in Romania. More studies are needed to analyse how to maintain these effects over time.

A cross-sectional research study was carried out among Romanian adolescents to identify gender differences in beliefs and behaviour regarding smoking. A written survey was conducted among 473 students aged 15-17 years from 5 senior high schools in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. All students filed in a questionnaire which assessed their smoking-related behaviour. The results show that one quarter (24.5%) of the subjects were smokers, a significant differences was noticed, regarding the prevalence of smoking between boys (32.2%) and girls (20.9%). Smoking behaviour served a stronger function for smoking girls to remain slim, while smoking boys had stronger beliefs that smoking helped them to relax. Self-efficacy expectations to handle emotional situations without smoking were significantly lower in smoking girls than in smoking boys. Moreover, in comparison with non-smoking boys, non-smoking girls reported low self-efficacy to maintain their non-smoking status when upset, depressed or nervous, and a stronger intention to start smoking than non-smoking boys. Non-smoking boys reported stronger pressures to smoke from their peers in the same school year. These findings have several implications for smoking prevention and reduction activities in Romania. First, smoking prevention programs should strengthen positive attitudes towards non-smoking, resistance against peer influences and enhance self-efficacy beliefs. Second, smoking prevention and reduction activities should address the fact that smoking is seen by Romanian girls as a way to control their weight, and as a way to relax by boys, and thus need to offer other healthier alternatives to realize these outcomes. Additionally, they need to address strategies to cope with emotional situations, in particular for girls.

The seasonal fluctuations of the morbidity of a population group in a city with strongly polluted atmosphere was compared with a non‐polluted city. The period of study comprised 5 years and included both adults and children. In order to compare the observed data the results were standardized per 100,000 of the population. In the case of adults, both the groups of acute respiratory infections and of acute bronchitis reach morbidity levels in polluted towns which exceed those of non‐polluted areas. In the town with strongly polluted atmosphere, in the case of children, the results confirm the greater frequency of the same diseases, while the seasonal curves present improvement only for a single period. This phenomenon supports the assumption that air pollution causes an increased number of diseases, irrespective of the season of the year. A clear seasonal phenomenon in the town with polluted atmosphere was observed in the case of chronical bronchitis, both in the case of adults and children. There ...