Study: Therapy can help smokers quit, even if they don’t want to
By Janice Lloyd, USA TODAY
Better, prolonged therapy for smokers helps them kick the habit, even smokers who have no desire to quit, according to studies released Monday.
“What we found is if you treat smoking like other health conditions and diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes, you’re more likely to be successful,” says lead author Anne Joseph, a physician and director of the University of Minnesota’s applied clinical research program. “With blood pressure, you’ll give medication to get near target goals, change diet and lifestyle and keep monitoring.”
Too often physicians do not do enough to help smokers who relapse, she says: “We often view relapse as failure and need to build in interim goals until success is achieved.”
Tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and is to blame for about 85% of lung cancers. Though smoking has declined for several years, the trend now has been mostly flat. A report in September showed nearly one in five adults (45.3 million) are smokers, down 3 million from 2005.
Novel approaches are needed to help people quit, the authors conclude in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine. “As you know, a vast majority of the time people fail,” Joseph says. Her study of 443 smokers compared success rates of smokers who received the standard treatment (eight weeks of counseling plus nicotine therapy) with smokers who had prolonged care (48 weeks of continued counseling and nicotine replacement).
The prolonged-care group was about 75% more effective at quitting smoking for the long term, Joseph said.
A famous quitter:
One of the most famous ex-smokers knows the drill.
“Quitting smoking is hard. Believe me, I know,’’ President Obama said in a Nov. 17 video interview for the Great American Smokeout campaign.
Obama’s physician declared him “tobacco free” after his October physical, ending 30 years of use by the president.
His overall health will benefit in time. In a research letter published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine, lead author Yin Cao of Harvard School of Public Health concludes the risk of death was significantly reduced among past smokers within 10 years of quitting compared to current smokers. By 20 years after quitting, the risk was further reduced, to the level of those who had never smoked.
The White House would not confirm if Obama chews Nicorette but he does chew some kind of gum. He said the best way to prevent health problems that come from smoking is to keep young people from getting hooked.
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