Delta Dental of Massachusetts Helps Extend CATCH My Breath Youth Anti-Vaping Program to More Massachusetts Middle Schools

Delta Dental of Massachusetts has joined forces with CATCH My Breath, the evidence-based and peer-reviewed youth nicotine vaping prevention program, to expand the reach of its programming to students in grades 5-12 across Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year.

“Vaping is extremely harmful to the lung health of young people and has been shown to increase the likelihood that they will try smoking, setting them up for a lifelong addiction that puts them at greater risk for heart disease and cancer and severely impacts their oral health by causing dental decay and gum disease,” said Dennis Leonard, CEO of Delta Dental of Massachusetts.  

CATCH My Breath aims to educate youth by empowering them with refusal skills needed to resist marketing attempts and peer pressure to start vaping. The evidence-based program has been shown to substantially reduce students’ likelihood of vaping in the year following program implementation. Students also showed a significant increase in knowledge of the dangers of vaping and an increase in positive perceptions about choosing a vape-free lifestyle. 

Delta Dental’s sponsorship supports expanding CATCH My Breath middle school video lessons to 200 schools across the state, provides program implementation training to educators at 40 schools, and provides train-the-trainer modules to six Massachusetts educators, enabling them to train other peers on best practices for implementation.   

The CATCH My Breath program, offered through CATCH Global Foundation, currently reaches more than 1 million youth in the U.S. annually. Recent studies show that youth who complete the program are 45 percent less likely to experiment with vaping than youth who do not. 

“CATCH has been at the forefront of the vaping prevention movement for the past four years,” said Duncan Van Dusen, CEO of CATCH Global Foundation. “Unfortunately, we continue to see youth adopt the habit of vaping at alarming rates. With generous partners like Delta Dental of Massachusetts, we can change this tide. We know that youth who complete our program are more likely to make the right decisions about vaping.” 

To learn more about how Massachusetts schools can get involved, please contact catchmybreath@catch.org.