Smoking Quitlines Work Regardless of How Smokers Recruited

Extract

Proactive telephone counseling helps smokers quit regardless of how they are recruited to a telephone quitline, according to a study published online June 10th in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Smokers who use telephone counseling quitlines may do so in response to active recruitment methods, such as physician referral or direct mail or phone calls, or passive methods, such as posters or television ads. Whether quitlines are equally effective for actively recruited smokers and passively recruited smokers has been a key question.

In this study, Flora Tzelepis, Ph.D., of the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues analyzed 24 previous studies of proactive telephone counseling to see whether the method of recruitment made a difference in quit rates. They looked at both point prevalence abstinence—the number of smokers who had not smoked for at least a day or a week before the interview—and at prolonged or continuous abstinence over a period of months.