Hookah is Gaining Popularity Among High School Seniors in the U.S.: CDC Report

One in every five American adolescents is using hookahs or cigars.  A latest report by CDC shows that teens in the U.S are shifting from cigarettes to more ethnically-linked alternative tobacco products.

The good news is that cigarette-smoking rate among teens in the U.S is on the decline. However, a new report by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention has warned that adolescents and young adults are now using hookahs and similar tobacco products.

New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) researchers worked on the CDC report.

Hookah is an ancient form of smoking that has charcoal-heated tobacco or shisha smoke. The smoke is passed through water before being inhaled. Hookah is also called narghile, argileh, shisha, hubble-bubble, and goza.

For the study, researchers used data from Monitoring the Future (MTF), which is a nation-wide study involving American teenagers. The present study was based on information provided by 5,540 students. Participants were asked about their hookah use from 2010 to 2012. The team found that one in every five high school seniors had used hookah.

The team found that socioeconomically affluent adolescents were more likely to use hookahs.

"Surprisingly, students with more educated parents or higher personal income are at high risk for use. We also found that hookah use is more common in cities, especially big cities. So hookah use is much different from cigarette use, which is more common in non-urban areas," said Joseph J. Palamar, at NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC), according to a news release.

Researchers said that the rise in the popularity of hookah is due to the belief that hookahs aren't as dangerous to health as cigarettes.

"Cigarette use has decreased by 33% in the past decade in the US, while the use of alternative tobacco products such as hookahs has increased an alarming 123%. This is especially worrisome given the public misperception that hookahs are a safe alternative to cigarettes whereas evidence suggests that they are even more damaging to health than are cigarettes," said co-author Michael Weitzman, MD, a professor of Pediatrics and of Environmental Medicine at the NYULMC.

Currently, hookah-use is more ritualistic, with people often visiting hookah bars to smoke. However, a new e-cigarette-like device - hookah pens - is gaining popularity, Palmer said. These hookah pens might make hookah-use more mainstream.

The study is published in the journal Pediatrics.