|
 To test the power of money to combat addiction, researchers in
Switzerland offered about 800 low-income smokers pamphlets and
online cessation guides. Half of them were also eligible to receive
as much as $1,650 if a series of six lab tests verified that they
stopped smoking.
These payments started out at $100 if lab tests verified
participants hadn’t smoked after one week, and gradually increased
to $440 by the time the last test was done at six months.
At six months, 36 percent of the payment group and about 6 percent
of the control group had quit smoking.
One year after the payments ended, about 10 percent of the people
eligible for financial incentives remained abstinent, compared with
roughly 4 percent for the control group.
“Money compensated for the loss of a valued activity (smoking) and
increased both the likelihood of making a quit attempt and the
likelihood of succeeding when trying to quit,” said lead study
author Jean-Francois Etter, a public health researcher at the
University of Geneva.
The participants were around 32 years old on average at the start of
the study and they had typically started smoking around age 17.
They tended to smoke about 16 cigarettes a day, a little less than a
pack.
About one in five were unemployed and roughly 45 percent were
students. Half of them made no more than about $20,000 a year.
All of the participants received self-help books with advice for
quitting and researchers also encouraged them to enlist a friend or
family member to support their efforts.
Researchers tested for carbon monoxide in exhaled air and a
byproduct of nicotine in saliva samples to confirm whether
participants had quit or continued to smoke.
While many people who quit relapsed after payments ended, abstinence
rates at the 18-month mark for the group that received financial
motivation were nearly 10 percent, compared to less than 4 percent
in the group that didn’t get any money, researchers report in the
Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
With a difference of about 6 percentage points between the control
and the payments group one year after the money stopped flowing, 17
people would need to go through an incentive program like the one in
the study to get one person to quit, the authors note.
[to top of second column] |
One limitation of the study is that a large proportion of the 81
participants who dropped out of the study were in the control group,
not the payments group, the authors note. Any participants who
dropped out or had missing data were counted as smokers.
People joining the study also knew some participants would receive
incentive payments, which could have impacted behavior, the authors
also point out.
Previous research, however, has shown that financial incentives can
help smokers remain abstinent, particularly among more affluent
employed smokers who have access to counseling and other cessation
support, Etter said by email.
With low-income smokers, cessation can be hard to encourage, Etter
said.
“Many interventions based on education (booklets, leaflets, various
education strategies) tend to work less well among people with low
income and low education, in whom smoking prevalence is particularly
high,” Etter said.
Still, the findings suggest that this method would cost about
$28,000 a year to get just one additional long-term quitter, Judith
Prochaska of Stanford University in California writes in an
accompanying editorial. This might limit adoption in the real world.
The appeal of this intervention is its simplicity, Prochaska told
Reuters Health by email.
“Individuals could create this type of intervention for themselves.”
Prochaska said. “A pack a day smoker who puts that money aside
rather than purchasing cigarettes would save over $2000 a year –
more than the payment provided in the study.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2biR8jh and http://bit.ly/2bkZVFH Journal of
the American College of Cardiology, online August 23, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
