In the Appalachian region of the country — where smoking rates are high, tobacco is often a cash crop and income and education levels are low — a smoking cessation effort led by non-medical professionals was successful in the short term, but quit rates trailed off in the long term.
"After a year, the initial promising quit rates were not sustained," said Mary Ellen Wewers, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor of public health at The Ohio State University College of Public Health. "This shows us that we need to think of smoking as a chronic condition similar to diabetes and high blood pressure, and management needs to be long term and intense."
Wewers and colleagues studied the effects of a smoking cessation intervention among more than 300 women in Ohio's Appalachian region. Results of this study are published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, as part of a special focus on tobacco in the December issue.
The Appalachian region is not as heavily studied as minority populations in urban areas, but Wewers said they often suffer from the same health-damaging socio-economic factors.
In the current study, only half of the participants had a high school degree. About half worked as unskilled laborers, and almost half (45 percent) had household incomes less than $20,000 annually. All of the women participants smoked. Wewers and colleagues randomly assigned half of the participants to a control group and half to an intervention group.
The control group received a personalized letter from their physician who advised them to quit smoking and requested they schedule a clinic appointment to discuss cessation methods.