Wisconsin university to study menthol

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention received a $368,000 grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institutes and the Food and Drug Administration to “study the use of menthol cigarettes” and contribute to the FDA’s research to determine whether or how to regulate the flavoring, reports the Wisconsin State Journal.

The grant begins this month and runs through June 2014. The principal research investigators will be Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker of the UW Center for Tobacco Research and James Stein of UW Preventive Cardiology Program.

According to the UW-CTRI website, the research will use data from the Wisconsin Smokers’ Health Study 2, a longitudinal study involving 2,500 participants and assessing dependence, participant characteristics and quitting attempts and successes, to determine associations of menthol cigarette smoking with dependence, cessation attempts and cessation success.