Countering the notion that teen smokers are a stubborn, tough-to-reach population, a new study finds many do want to quit and will utilize Web sites designed to help them escape nicotine's grip.

University of Rochester researcher Dr. Jonathan D. Klein and colleagues surveyed 418 teens in Monroe County, N.Y., before the launch of the teen-focused antismoking Web site, www.gottaquit.com. The researchers then surveyed 259 of these kids one year after that launch.

Twenty-five percent, or one in every four teen smokers polled in the second survey, said they had visited the site, compared with just 4 percent of the nonsmokers.

"This was a study to see whether the teens received the messages, to see who went to the Web site, and to see if they went for cessation information. We did not study whether they actually quit because of their use of the Web site," Klein said. The study appears in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.

"This was the first time the campaign was studied," noted Klein, an associate professor of pediatrics at the university. "This was a local campaign funded by some of the [state] tobacco settlement money in New York."

"Some local data had shown us that most adolescents -- although addicted and saying they want to quit and have in fact tried to quit -- don't think about going to their physician or getting self-help," he added.

When surveyed before the campaign, 15 percent of the 418 teens who answered said they had smoked in the past 30 days. In the follow-up survey, 13.5 percent of 259 teens said they had smoked in the past month.

Of this group, 90 percent of the recent smokers in the first survey and nearly 94 percent of those in the later survey said they considered themselves a smoker, and the majority -- 87 percent and 73 percent, respectively -- said that they wanted to quit.

Experts believe that getting teens to stop smoking early on is key to preventing them from becoming long-term adult smokers. About 80 percent of adult smokers begin smoking before they reached age 18, experts say, and in this study the average age of first smoking was just 14. According to Klein, each day in the United States about 2,000 U.S. teens become established smokers.

The Gotta Quit site, designed to appeal to teens, is colorful and includes tips on how to quit, information on the dangers and other data.

Another expert, Thomas Valente, director of the Master of Public Health Program at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, in Los Angeles, said the study has some methodology flaws, with a lack of comparability between the first survey sample and the second.

But he emphasized that a Web site alone, while it may be valuable and attract teen smokers, won't be enough to help them quit.

"It takes multiple methods and multiple media," he said. "No one medium, whether a Web site, poster or workshop, is going to do it."

"Parents [of teen smokers] should give support and there should be peer support," he said. Teens who want to quit would do well, he said, to hang with kids who don't smoke or who have quit.

Parents can also offer teen smokers non-health-related incentives to quit, Valente said. There's the romantic angle, with studies suggesting smoking makes people less attractive to others. Alternatively, adding up the monetary costs of smoking over a lifetime can also discourage teens and motivate them, he said.

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