New Smoking Cessation Propose

Quitlines have played an essential role in helping people quit smoking discount Vogue cigarettes in the U.S. These services, however, had never been tested with Asian immigrants who may have limited proficiency in English. Dr. Shu-Hong Zhu, a Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and his colleagues designed an intervention to test the effectiveness of quitline counseling for Asian immigrant smokers. The study was embedded into the California quitline service operated by UCSD. Dr. Zhu and his team developed a culturally tailored counseling protocol and tested its effectiveness in Chinese-, Korean-, and Vietnamese-speaking smokers in a large randomized trial. Participants were 2,277 adult smokers who were first time callers to the Asian-language lines of the California Smokers' Helpline. Study participants were randomly assigned to receive either telephone counseling and self-help materials or self-help materials alone. The researchers compared 6-month abstinence rates and found that telephone counseling doubled the odds of quitting compared to self-help materials. Smokers in the telephone counseling group showed higher quit rates compared to those in the self-help group overall and for each language separately. According to Dr. Zhu, "This study was designed to test a common counseling protocol for three diverse Asian immigrant groups. Counseling proved effective in each case, suggesting that the common protocol could be used with other Asian language groups. Although scientifically it might be interesting to continue to test the protocol, the more urgent need is to extend the use of this proven protocol to all Asian language groups to provide these smokers with the help they need to succeed." In a second study published January 25 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, sustained release bupropion (bupropion SR) was shown to be effective in helping smoking cessation during the medication phase of treatment but doesn't have a long-term effect on smoking cessation in African American light smokers.