Chunk #30 — Suggested Criteria for the Assessment of Tobacco Dependence — Rationale for Included Criteria — Criteria 3 & 4: Time to first cigarette (TTFC) after waking, and usual number of cigarettes consumed per day (cpd)
The FTND directly asks about smoking heaviness (both items 1 & 4 relate to this: Table 2). There is potential for circularity when an assessment asks about smoking heaviness and then validates it with a self-report of smoking heaviness. This applies especially to Item 4, but less so to Item 1. It should be noted, though, that these items correlate with both carbon monoxide and cotinine levels [8, 99–101], which are linearly related to blood nicotine level, demonstrating that the items index effective dose or metabolic biomarkers. Secondly, both items predict likelihood of future cessation (e.g., [22]); thus, their predictive validity cannot be attributed to common method variance or misleading self-perception. The evidence suggests that these items directly and economically assess a clinically and theoretically meaningful TD dimension.
