Last week the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a grant of $450,000 to Chair of the Psychology Department Lisa Dierker and Research Associate Professor Jennifer Rose to fund their research on nicotine dependence in adolescents. Dierker and Rose began their project a few years ago but ran into problems when they realized it would cost too much money to gather a complete pool of data.

“We started [our research] after realizing that most of the measures of nicotine dependence were developed using only heavy-smoking adults, without taking adolescents into account,” Rose said.

The studies also assumed that only people who smoked daily could become addicted to nicotine. One of the first studies Dierker and Rose conducted, however, showed that even adolescents who smoked only a few cigarettes a month could develop mild symptoms of addiction, such as craving cigarettes and prioritizing smoking over other activities.

“In another study that Dierker conducted, she asked whether these mild symptoms mattered,” Rose said. “Did they predict anything about the teenagers’ future? And in fact, they do. She discovered that these adolescents were more prone to becoming heavy smokers later in life.”

Rose and Dierker realized, however, that the studies they had conducted didn’t provide a complete set of data. In order to make a valid claim about nicotine dependence in adolescence, they said they would need to screen thousands of subjects. The professors came across existing reports that provided the necessary data, but still lacked the funds to compile it.

“There are several studies out there that use different measures of nicotine dependence, some with kids who smoke a lot and others with kids who smoke only a little,” Rose said. “We want to pool all these studies together so we can have a larger array of symptoms and a more diverse group of adolescents to work with. Then, we can test which symptoms seem to be best at tapping nicotine dependence in young novice smokers.”

In 2010, Rose applied for a two-year grant from the NIDA so that she and Dierker could have the resources to move on to the next stage of their research.

“The application [for the grant] is an R21 exploratory report,” Rose said. “We fit that mechanism well because we’re using a new approach to collect data and analyze it through a statistical method.”

Although Rose’s application continued to receive good scores from the Institute, the project wasn’t initially granted funding due to the financial climate. However, now one year later, the proposal has finally been accepted. The grant will allow Rose to travel throughout the country and present her work at various conferences. She will also go to the University of North Carolina to collaborate with other researchers who have already used the new statistical method.

The response to the news has been relatively positive among the Wesleyan community. Jelisa Adair ’13 said she believes the research could have an incredible impact on the University’s student body.

“I have often noticed how many students here smoke, which is interesting given the socioeconomic and racial background of many of the kids,” she said. “I think this research could help explain this phenomenon and hopefully do something about it, since the population here already knows the dangers of smoking.”