UW-CTRI Researcher Dr. Jesse Kaye represented the Center well at the 2025 UW Department of Medicine Research Day.
He presented a talk and created a poster on the Smoking Treatment for Oncology Patients Study (the STOP Cancer Study), bringing home a Department Speaker Award. Dr. Kaye and Dr. Danielle McCarthy also served as poster judges for the Research Day (recusing themselves from their team’s poster).
UW-CTRI Researcher Mark Zehner presented the poster on behalf of the UW-CTRI research team.
Both the talk and poster were titled, “Bringing the NCI Moonshot Cancer Center Cessation Initiative to UW Carbone Cancer Center: A Pilot Centralized Proactive Outreach Approach to Offer Tobacco Treatment for Patients with Cancer.”
Kaye said research shows that when people who smoke get a cancer diagnosis, about half will try to quit smoking. However, few use evidence-based help and even fewer still quit.
So, UW-CTRI partnered with the UW Carbone Cancer Center to use electronic health records to identify oncology patients who smoke.
These patients were called by UW-CTRI’s health counselors in a proactive, opt-out fashion to let them know about their tobacco treatment options.
The study compared two active treatments to see which helps more people with cancer quit smoking. Standard care involved two weeks of free nicotine replacement medications and three quit smoking coaching calls, similar to what is offered by the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line. Enhanced care involved 12 weeks of varenicline and seven coaching calls that were specifically tailored for patients with cancer.
More than 570 patients with cancer who smoked were identified using electronic health records or oncologist referral. Researchers connected with 70 percent of them and only 3.5% of those proactively opted out. Thirteen percent engaged in evidence-based tobacco use treatment.
Fifty-two patients enrolled in the study. Patients reported high satisfaction with their treatment; those in the enhanced care portion gave especially high ratings.
Kaye said they found that integrating tobacco treatment into standard cancer care is feasible and acceptable to patients. This approach of a centralized tobacco specialty care team that proactively reaches out to patients and provides tobacco treatment holds promise as a scalable, sustainable model.
“Patients with cancer want to quit smoking,” Kaye said, “and when they’re offered help to do it, patients are engaged and satisfied with tobacco treatment. We were expecting this study to be rather slow and difficult to enroll patients in, so pleasantly surprised to see how many patients signed up. What we weren’t surprised to see were the high satisfaction scores–kudos to our incredible team of UW-CTRI Health Counselors Chris Ripley, Tess Kuba, and Renae Borkowski.”
Zehner and Kaye agreed they’re looking forward to reviewing quit rates from the Standard Care and Enhanced Care groups later this year.
Previous research shows quitting smoking after cancer diagnoses helps people recover from cancer and helps prevent recurrences and new cancers.
This study is just the latest step in a long-standing partnership between UW-CTRI and the UW 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 over the past 6 years.
UW-CTRI founders Dr. Tim Baker and Dr. Michael Fiore edited the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Tobacco Control Monograph #23: Treating Smoking in Cancer Patients: An Essential Component of Cancer Care that highlights the value of treating tobacco use in cancer care. This monograph helped inform the interventions used to treat tobacco use at the Carbone Cancer Center, Fiore said.
Dr. Danielle McCarthy has served as Principal Investigator of the STOP Cancer Study with the support of many UW-CTRI team members, including Drs. Kaye, Fiore, and Baker. McCarthy is the UW-CTRI Director for Implementation and Health Services Research and also directs the C3I Coordinating Center.
The long-term objective of this work is to identify promising strategies to evaluate in larger-scale trials and then disseminate to cancer programs. Kaye said he hopes to continue collaborating with Carbone colleagues to continue to bring quit-smoking treatments into standard oncology practice here at UW.