‘Intensive care helps smokers quit’

WASHINGTON: An intensive stop-smoking program with at least three months of counselling and free drugs can help smokers kick the habit, US researchers reported on Monday. 

Their intensive care program helped 39 percent of smokers stay tobacco-free for two years, the team at Creighton University Cardiac Centre in Omaha, Nebraska reported.

“What we have shown is that a very planned and organised approach to cessation of smoking, with careful follow-up, works much better than the current practice of simply advising them to quit smoking,” said Dr Syed Mohiuddin, who led the study.

Mohiuddin and colleagues tested a program to see how well counselling would work among a group of smokers who should be highly motivated — patients in the coronary care unit suffering from heart attacks, severe coronary heart disease or a type of chest pain known as unstable angina.

“Our study showed that intense treatment intervention not only succeeded in getting patients to quit smoking, but it reduced hospitalisations and mortality, as well,” Mohiuddin said in a telephone interview.

They divided 209 volunteers into two groups. All were told to quit smoking and got 30 minutes of counselling with self-help materials. Half then were given at least 12 weeks of behaviour modification counselling and either nicotine replacement therapy, treatment with the drug bupropion, or both.

Bupropion is an antidepressant that has also been shown to help people quit smoking. After two years, 39 per cent of the intensive treatment patients were still not smoking, compared to 9 per cent of the usual care group.