Smoking doesn’t just endanger teens’ physical health; it promotes major depression, possibly through the impact of nicotine on youthful brains, suggests a study published October 2.

In 1999, 35% of U.S. high school boys and an equal percentage of girls smoked, up from 27% of girls and 28% of boys in 1991.

An estimated 15% to 20% suffer major depression at some time during adolescence.

A well-known link between smoking and teen depression exists because depressed teens start smoking to cope, scientists have assumed.

But for many, the reverse may be true. Among mentally healthy teens, smokers are nearly four times as likely as non-smokers to develop depression within a year’s time, the study shows.

Parents should realize that "smoking in kids is never something to just shrug off," says study leader Elizabeth Goodman of Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati.

Her report, in the journal Pediatrics, followed 9,205 U.S. teens for one year.

When she accounted for other factors that can affect smoking rates, kids depressed at the start were no more likely than the non-depressed to smoke at least a pack a week after a year.

The new findings "are important because they show you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. . . . Smoking could be causing depression through effects on the brain we don’t understand yet, and other kids may use cigarettes to help them with depression," says Linda Pederson, an expert on teen smoking at the federal Office on Smoking and Health.

Recent evidence that antidepressants help adults quit smoking raises the possibility that "there’s a common pathway" in the nervous system causing both nicotine addiction and depression, Goodman says.

More research is needed to clarify the tie between cigarettes and depression, Pederson says.

As printed in the VHL Family Forum 8:4, December 2000. For permission to reprint, please contact VHL Family Alliance, editor@vhl.org. Further information is available from the VHL Family Alliance, info@vhl.org.