Smoking Cessation

Abstract

Cigarette smoking is the primary cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and smoking cessation is the most effective means of stopping the progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Worldwide, approximately a billion people smoke cigarettes and 80% reside in low-income and middle-income countries. Though in the United States there has been a substantial decline in cigarette smoking since 1964, when the Surgeon General's report first reviewed smoking, smoking remains widespread in the United States today (about 23% of the population in 2001). Nicotine is addictive, but there are now effective drugs and behavioral interventions to assist people to overcome the addiction. Available evidence shows that smoking cessation can be helped with counseling, nicotine replacement, and bupropion. Less-studied interventions, including hypnosis, acupuncture, aversive therapy, exercise, lobeline, anxiolytics, mecamylamine, opioid agonists, and silver acetate, have assisted some people in smoking cessation, but none of those interventions has strong research evidence of efficacy. To promote smoking cessation, physicians should discuss with their smoking patients “relevance, risk, rewards, roadblocks, and repetition,” and with patients who are willing to attempt to quit, physicians should use the 5-step system of “ask, advise, assess, assist, and arrange.” An ideal smoking cessation program is individualized, accounting for the reasons the person smokes, the environment in which smoking occurs, available resources to quit, and individual preferences about how to quit. The clinician should bear in mind that quitting smoking can be very difficult, so it is important to be patient and persistent in developing, implementing, and adjusting each patient's smoking-cessation program. One of the most effective behavioral interventions is advice from a health care professional; it seems not to matter whether the advice is from a doctor, respiratory therapist, nurse, or other clinician, so smoking cessation should be encouraged by multiple clinicians. However, since respiratory therapists interact with smokers frequently, we believe it is particularly important for respiratory therapists to show leadership in implementing smoking cessation.