Use of smokeless tobacco helped hard-to-quit smokers give up their habit, according to a seven-year follow-up of participants in a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) clinical study.
The study, published in the January-March issue of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, reports on subjects who were contacted seven years after completion of a smoking cessation program that replaced cigarettes with smokeless tobacco products as a harm-reduction strategy.
In 1998 Rodu and UAB co-authors Ken Tilashalski, D.M.D., and Phil Cole, M.D., Dr.P.H., reported on one-year success rates from a clinical trial that was the first to use smokeless tobacco as a nicotine substitute. That program resulted in quit-rates of 31 percent among men and 19 percent among women using smokeless tobacco. Before that study, most participants had failed to quit with prescription nicotine products, and more than half had used both a nicotine patch and nicotine gum.
This month’s journal article reports that 75 percent of smokers who had quit with smokeless tobacco at one year still were smoke-free at seven years. In contrast, among smokers in the program who failed to quit after one year, only 29 percent were smoke-free at the seven-year mark.
“We started this program because we had documented that the use of smokeless tobacco carries a 98 percent lower risk of dying than does cigarette smoking,” said Dr. Brad Rodu, pathology professor and a senior scientist at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. “It is the inhaled smoke and not the nicotine that causes lung cancer, heart disease and other health problems. We wanted to see if offering inveterate smokers a smoke-free alternative could help them finally quit smoking.