Chicago, Nov. 6 (Reuters): Nearly 40 per cent of US adolescents who give cigarette smoking a try do so because they saw it in movies, a study said.

The study urged Hollywood to cut back on depictions of smoking or shots of cigarette brands. The industry should consider adding a mention of smoking to movie rating data that now mention explicit sex, violence and profanity, it said.

Researchers asked 6,522 children aged 10 to 14 to identify films they had seen from a list of 50 randomly selected box office hits in the US.

Of every 100 adolescents who tried smoking, 38 did so because they saw smoking portrayed in movies, said the report published in the November issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.