UW-CTRI and the UW Carbone Cancer Center have successfully welcomed 52 Carbone patients who smoke into the Smoking Treatment for Oncology Patients Study (the STOP Cancer Study), reaching full recruitment.
STOP Cancer is designed to let participants know how quitting smoking can help their recovery, and what tobacco treatment options are available.
UW-CTRI staff proactively contact patients with cancer to let them know about their tobacco treatment options. This approach aims to ensure all patients with cancer who use tobacco products are offered help in quitting tobacco use, without burdening patients or their providers. UW-CTRI staff tell patients about their different options to help them quit smoking, such as talking to their primary care team, contacting the free Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line, or joining the STOP Cancer Study.
All patients who join the study receive evidence-based medications and counseling. Researchers will compare a more intensive treatment with standard treatment to see which helps more people with cancer quit smoking.
“We appreciate the great work of our entire study team,” said UW-CTRI Researcher Dr. Jesse Kaye. “The database, regulatory, and finance teams got us up and running in record time. The amount of up-front work required for a small pilot study like this isn’t necessarily that much less than for a large study from the database perspective. It’s a big lift.”
Enrolling participants in cancer clinical trials can be difficult, due to the stress and burden of living with cancer and going through cancer treatment. But UW-CTRI’s health counselors, Renae Borkowski, Tess Kuba, and Chris Ripley, completed recruitment very efficiently, said Kaye and Principal Investigator Dr. Danielle McCarthy.
“It’s a very impressive feat of reaching out to hundreds of patients with cancer to make sure they know about the different tobacco treatment options that are available to them,” Kaye said. “It’s a true testament to the great rapport our health counselors develop with the patients they work with.”
Connecting patients living with cancer with treatment to help them quit tobacco use is an important pillar of good cancer care. Quitting smoking after cancer diagnoses helps people recover from cancer and helps prevent recurrences and new cancers.
This is just the latest step in a long-standing partnership between UW-CTRI and the Carbone Cancer Center on ways to enhance cancer care through tobacco treatment. This study also builds on UW-CTRI leadership of the NCI Moonshot Cancer Center Cessation Initiative (C3I) Coordinating Center that has helped 52 NCI-designated cancer centers offer tobacco treatment to more than 100,000 patients with cancer. UW-CTRI researchers will take the lessons learned from C3I and the Tobacco Treatment Implementation Roadmap, along with the STOP Cancer Study to inform future research to discover ways to enhance tobacco treatment for patients with cancer at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.
