News
A proactive tobacco cessation programme in the USA can substantially promote smoking cessation in smokers of low socioeconomic status, new research suggests. Jennifer Haas (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA) and colleagues noted that in the USA, the rate of decline in tobacco use is slower in smokers of low socioeconomic status than in wealthier smokers, which helps to account for the wide socioeconomic disparities in mortality in the country. The researchers did a prospective, randomised trial in which they used electronic health records and interactive voice response techniques to recruit smokers from low socioeconomic status backgrounds from 13 practices in the greater Boston region. They compared usual care provided to the smokers (n=308) by primary care clinicians with a proactive treatment programme (n=399) that included motivational counselling by telephone, access to free nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), community-based referrals to reduce
the sociocontextual mediators of tobacco use, and integration of these components into the smokers’ normal health care. The researchers noted that the proportion of people quitting smoking was higher in the intervention group than in the usual care group (17·8% vs 8·1%; odds ratio 2·5, 95% CI 1·5–4·0, p
A proactive tobacco cessation programme in the USA can substantially promote smoking cessation in smokers of low socioeconomic status, new research suggests. Jennifer Haas (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA) and colleagues noted that in the USA, the rate of decline in tobacco use is slower in smokers of low socioeconomic status than in wealthier smokers, which helps to account for the wide socioeconomic disparities in mortality in the country. The researchers did a prospective, randomised trial in which they used electronic health records and interactive voice response techniques to recruit smokers from low socioeconomic status backgrounds from 13 practices in the greater Boston region. They compared usual care provided to the smokers (n=308) by primary care clinicians with a proactive treatment programme (n=399) that included motivational counselling by telephone, access to free nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), community-based referrals to reduce
the sociocontextual mediators of tobacco use, and integration of these components into the smokers’ normal health care. The researchers noted that the proportion of people quitting smoking was higher in the intervention group than in the usual care group (17·8% vs 8·1%; odds ratio 2·5, 95% CI 1·5–4·0, p
