Evaluation of a Smoking Prevention Intervention Aimed at Youth: Pataclope

Abstract

Tobacco is responsible for 66,000 deaths per year in France, which makes it one of the most important national public health priorities. Pre-adolescents, at the age where this addiction usually begins, are a particularly interesting target group for the implementation of prevention activities. It is for this reason that in 1990, the French National League against Cancer established a set of non-smoking youth clubs ("Pataclope") of which the main objective is to prevent adolescents from starting to smoke. An evaluation programme was put into place in 1999 in order to better understand the impact of these clubs on the prevalence of smoking in 15 year olds, which corresponds to the age of former participants one year after leaving the clubs. A comparison between a group of youth having participated in the Pataclope clubs and a group of adolescents taken from the general population was carried out at the national level. Those selected were 15 years of age and were in high school. An anonymous self-questionnaire on their tobacco habits and factors of addiction was distributed to the two groups. The analysis involved a total of 3274 questionnaires, 899 of which were from Pataclope participants and 2375 from the sample population. The primary results show that the prevalence rates according to sex essentially mirror those of the Baromètre santé 2000, among other accepted statistics (25.5% for girls and 19.9% for boys versus 31.6% for girls and 18.1% for boys in the Baromètre santé 2000). One year after leaving the clubs, the former Pataclope members see their risk of becoming a smoker reduced by 26% with respect to those who were not club members (OR = .74 adjusted for the factors of addiction), within a model which regroups smokers and ex-smokers versus non-smokers. In utilising this model which takes into account the ex-smokers and smokers as two distinct categories (the reference always being non-smokers), the reduction of risk in being a smoker is always significant, and goes up to 50% less risk (OR = 0.5) for members of Pataclope. The probability of being an ex-smoker is identical in the two groups: given that once one has taken up smoking, the Pataclope members present the same smoking behaviours as the general population (same consumption, same age of quitting, and the same frequency of quitting). The activity of the Pataclope clubs has been encouraging in at least slowing or hindering the commencement of smoking in youth aged 15 years. However, these results require a confirmation in the long term. The lack of impact on the ex-smokers tends to demonstrate that the message of clubs reinforces a non-smoking behaviour but remains ineffective on quitting, once smoking has been taken up.