Counselors were more successful in motivating smokers to quit when they explored the smokers' personal values, discussed their knowledge of the health risks, and supported patients as they tried to solve their problem, a University of Rochester study has found.
After at least four sessions during a six-month period, the smokers were more likely to make a serious attempt to quit--49.7 percent versus 39 percent for those getting community care--and to use medications to help them stop, preliminary results show.
"The intervention was found to motivate patients to quit whether they reported wanting to or not at the start," said Dr. Geoffrey Williams, the study's principal investigator and associate professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. The Smokers' Health Project accepted 1,000 participants during the past four years and invited all of them to talk about health, diet, and smoking issues during their sessions.
At the end of four visits, if participants decided not to quit in the next 30 days, they left the group with general information, a referral to their physician, and to other smoking cessation programs in Rochester. Even for that group, "the long-term quit rate nearly tripled" when they participated in the program, the study found.
The initial research study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. NIH recently awarded the researchers an additional $2.8 million grant over five years to recruit more people for the next phase of the project.
"Although there are effective interventions to help people break the smoking habit, little is known about what motivates people to do it," explained Williams. The team of Williams, faculty members Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the University's Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, and Daryl Sharp, assistant professor and psychiatric nurse practitioner from the University's School of Nursing, is trying to understand more about how smokers see their health, and how the patients' perspective on their health may motivate change.