Tobacco companies designed cigarettes to appeal to women's desires to be thin and healthy in ways that went "far beyond marketing and advertising," health researchers said.

They said internal documents released by tobacco companies under a 1998 court settlement show the companies created cigarettes, including "slim" and so-called "light" brands, in part to attract women.

"These internal documents reveal that the tobacco industry's targeting of women goes far beyond marketing and advertising," said Carrie Murray Carpenter of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study.

Writing in the June issue of the journal Addiction, Carpenter and colleagues said their study of tobacco company documents show a clear effort to find out what might make women want to smoke.

The firms also considered putting appetite suppressants into cigarettes so they could promote them as weight control products, they said.

"How unfortunate that the industry used these findings to exploit women and not help them. Cigarette designs and ingredients were manipulated in an effort to make cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke," Jack Henningfield of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues wrote in a commentary.

Carpenter's team said tobacco companies' efforts to attract women included the creation of "slim" cigarettes in the 1970s.

"These studies demonstrate that marketing strategies, especially for female brands, have contributed to the association of smoking with appealing attributes including female liberation, glamour, success and thinness," they wrote.

INTERNAL DOCUMENTS

Carpenter's team sifted through more than 7 million internal tobacco industry documents made public through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the state attorneys general and major U.S. tobacco manufacturers including Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA unit, Reynolds American Inc. and British American Tobacco Plc (BAT).

Tobacco companies also targeted "light" cigarette brands, with their promise of smaller amounts of harmful tar and nicotine, to women torn between the desire to smoke and health worries.

"We can safely conclude that the strength of cigarettes that are purchased by women is related to their degree of neuroticism," the paper cites one 1982 BAT document as reading. "Women buy cigarettes in order to help them cope with neuroticism."

A 1985 Philip Morris document reads: "(Women) do not want to stop smoking, yet they are guilt-ridden with concerns for their families if smoking should badly damage their own health. Thus they compromise by smoking low-tar cigarettes."

Understanding what the companies have done, Carpenter's team said, is key to finding ways to help women quit smoking.

In the United States, 19 percent of adult women and 24 percent of adult men smoke, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Smoking is the single biggest cause of heart disease and cancer.

Spokespeople for Philip Morris and Altria said they had not seen the full reports and could not immediately comment.