A new study shows that tobacco use in US-released movies aimed at young people rose sharply between 2010 and 2016.

During the period, 46 percent of films with smoking imagery were youth-rated. This amounted to 210 of the 459 top-grossing films. And in movies rated PG-13, the number of incidents of smoking surged from 564 to 809. 

This is a public health concern, the authors said, and could lead more young people to start smoking. A 2012 US Surgeon General’s report concluded that depictions of smoking in movies cause young people to start smoking. It also notes that young people who are heavily exposed to images onscreen of smoking are two to three times as likely to begin smoking as youth who receive little exposure.

"Modernizing Hollywood's rating system to protect the audience by awarding movies with smoking an R rating would save a million kids' lives," said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. "That is the best way that the six big media companies that control the Motion Picture Association of America could ensure that movies marketed to kids are not also selling cigarettes."

"Since 2010, there has been no progress in reducing the total number of tobacco incidents in youth-rated movies," Glantz, who founded Smokefree Movies, which aims to improve public policy and film industry practice, in 2001, was quoted as saying in a news release. "There is an enormous need to implement an industry-wide standard by requiring that all movies rated for kids are smoke-free."

(With inputs from Xinhua)