How UW-CTRI Research Addresses Tobacco Disparities

UW-CTRI welcomes participants from all walks of life and backgrounds in its research studies, and actively reaches out to populations who smoke the most and suffer disproportionately from it.

The Center maintains offices in downtown Milwaukee and Madison, and regularly recruits and enrolls study participants from diverse groups, often at rates greater than their representation in the general Wisconsin population.

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• Grant Empowers Team to Address Smoking Disparities in Milwaukee
• Collaborators Empower African Americans to Quit Tobacco Use
• JAMA Paper Points to Progress Empowering African Americans to Quit Smoking
• UW-CTRI Identifies New Approach to Help More People Quit Smoking, Reduce Disparities
• FDA Proposes Rules Prohibiting Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars

The goal is to learn about tobacco addiction among all smokers – including subpopulations disproportionately affected by tobacco use. UW-CTRI strives to learn how best to help all tobacco users to quit, and to intervene with free resources to help them avoid the harms of tobacco use.

UW-CTRI investigates ways to enhance treatment effectiveness among groups that traditionally benefit less from treatment to see if adding treatments for these groups can help more disadvantaged people quit for good. In addition, we work with healthcare systems to assess the equity of their efforts to engage patients who smoke in evidence-based treatment. This work suggests that proactively offering stop-smoking treatment to patients who smoke is a good way to reach those from typically underserved groups. These research efforts may identify ways to reduce disparities in smoking and its costs.

UW-CTRI Co-Director of Research Dr. Megan Piper, a former president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), recently discussed the work of the SRNT racial equity taskforce.

UW-CTRI also doesn’t just enroll diverse populations in its research; the Center also shares the research results with clinicians and patients so they directly benefit from the research. In addition, virtually all UW-CTRI studies provide free counseling and medications and reimburse participants for their time and travel while in the study.

A key goal is to share the treatments and resources in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea – to take the University’s efforts and share them statewide – with a particular emphasis on  underserved groups who smoke to promote health equity.

Below are a few more examples from UW-CTRI research.

The Striving to Quit study recruited Medicaid members. The research team strove for inclusivity. For example, among the participants, 51% were black and 60% female.