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Bridging the Clinical and Public Health Perspectives in Tobacco Treatment Research

Scenes from a Tobacco Treatment Research Career¹

Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative, and Department of Health Services, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98101

Abstract

This paper, delivered as the 2000 Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award Lecture, reviews smoking cessation treatment research conducted over the past 15 years at the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative. The research program includes assessment, treatment, and health services research that addressed four main questions: (a) What motivates people to quit smoking? (b) Are self-help interventions effective? (c) Can health care benefits impact the utilization of smoking cessation services? and (d) Does smoking cessation impact health care utilization and costs?

In the area of motivation for smoking cessation, an intrinsic-extrinsic model of type of motivation for smoking cessation was used to develop and validate a reasons for quitting scale. Results from administration of the scale across different samples of smokers show that higher levels of intrinsic relative to extrinsic motivation predicts successful cessation. A series of five randomized trials of self-help interventions indicate that self-help interventions accompanied by motivational feedback and/or outreach telephone counseling can be effective. However, the same interventions did not improve long-term abstinence rates in non-volunteer samples of smokers.

With regard to health care benefits, we find that full coverage of smoking cessation services improves the reach of proven interventions into the general population of smokers with no significant reductions in effectiveness. Furthermore, studies of smoking cessation and health care utilization find that, although quitters have higher initial costs, their costs go down at the same time that those of continuing smokers’ begin to accelerate. Cessation appears to reverse a trajectory of higher health care costs.