information:filtering, quality:correction, stylistic:tone
Funding by tobacco companies

Further discrediting the so-called Type A Behavior Pattern (TABP), a study from 2012 – based on searching the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents – suggests the phenomenon of initially promising results followed by negative findings to be partly explained by the tobacco industry's involvement in TABP research to undermine the scientific evidence on smoking and health. Documents indicate that around 1959, the tobacco industry first became interested in the TABP when the Tobacco Institute Research Committee received an application for funding from New York University in order to investigate the relationship between smoking and personality. The industry's interest in TABP lasted at least four decades until the late 1990s, involving substantial funding to key researchers encouraged to prove smoking to simply correlate with a personality type prone to coronary heart disease (CHD) and cancer. Hence, until the early 1980s, the industry's strategy consisted of suggesting the risks of smoking to be caused by psychological characteristics of individual smokers rather than tobacco products by deeming the causes of cancer to be multifactorial with stress as a key contributing factor. Philip Morris (today Altria) and RJ Reynolds helped generate substantial evidence to support these claims by funding workshops and research aiming to educate about and alter TABP to reduce risks of CHD and cancer. Moreover, Philip Morris primarily funded the Meyer Friedman Institute, e.g. conducting the "crown-jewel" trial on the effectiveness of reducing TABP whose expected findings could discredit studies associating smoking with CHD and cancer but failing to control for Type A behavior.