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Based on data for more than 1,200 adult smokers in Canada, the real
average number of quit attempts before succeeding may be closer to
30.
“For so long we’ve been talking about five to seven attempts to
quit,” said lead author Dr. Michael Chaiton of the school of public
health at the University of Toronto in Canada. “For us (the numbers)
were a lot higher.”
The lower estimate comes from a few past studies that were based on
the lifetime recollections of people who successfully quit, but they
didn’t include attempts by people who had not yet succeeded, Chaiton
and colleagues note in the journal BMJ Open.
For their study, the researchers analyzed data from 1,277 people in
the Ontario Tobacco Survey who were followed for up to three years.
When the study began in 2005, participants reported how many times
they recalled ever making a serious attempt to quit smoking, and at
each six-month follow-up they reported how many serious quit
attempts they had made over the past six months.
A quit attempt was deemed a success when a participant went at least
one year without a cigarette.
The researchers used these responses and four different statistical
models to estimate how many times the average smoker attempts to
quit before succeeding. The most unbiased model suggested an average
of 30 quit attempts per smoker.
That’s much higher than people tended to report in the previous
studies when asked about all their quit attempts since starting
smoking, the study team writes.
“People are very bad at remembering over their whole lifetimes,”
Chaiton told Reuters Health. “The second problem is we were only
asking people who have been successful at quitting.”
The new study may be a better representation of what most smokers go
through over time, but it does only describe their situation rather
than predict what will happen to an individual smoker who tries to
quit, he cautioned.
“This doesn’t mean you hit a magic number and then you can quit,”
Chaiton said. “There are many people who are able to and do quit on
their first attempt or in the first few.
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“There are people who are good at many things, some are good at
quitting smoking,” he added.
Quitting smoking is often a long-term process with many attempts, he
said.
“When we talk about trying to reduce the number of smokers, if we
try and do that by focusing on one quit attempt at a time we’re not
going to be very successful,” Chaiton said.
A range of smoking cessation medications, policies like smoke-free
spaces and plain-pack warnings can all help some smokers quit, he
said.
“The main impact of this article is that clinicians should reassure
smokers that, just because they have failed 10 times, does not mean
they will never quit,” said Dr. John Hughes of the University of
Vermont School of Medicine in Burlington.
“However, the problem with taking, say, 20 times to quit, is that
this may take 10 years and it’s not only important to quit but it’s
important to quit while you are younger,” said Hughes, who was not
part of the new study.
“So it’s important for those who failed several times to seek
treatment to increase odds of quitting and we have lots of
medication and counseling treatments that work,” Hughes told Reuters
Health by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/28LH9ED BMJ Open, online June 9, 2016.
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