UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention
UW-CTRI Director Dr. Michael Fiore and Dr. Robin Mermelstein of the University of Illinois at Chicago last week presented tobacco control research priorities to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Board of Scientific Advisors (BSA) on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. For the last year, Drs. Fiore and Mermelstein have …
UW-CTRI Outreach staff attended the annual state conference of the Wisconsin Tobacco Prevention and Control Program. Here, Christy Vogt of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services speaks to the group. Several UW-CTRI staff members attended the annual Tobacco Prevention and Control Program statewide conference this past month in the Wisconsin Dells. The meeting included a wide array of …
UW-CTRI has begun working with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to help ensure inmates stay smoke-free following their release from prison. DOC’s interest in inmate smoking relapse reflects their core objective of working with inmates so they do not reoffend. DOC staff know that the risk for reoffending increases dramatically when an inmate relapses regarding …
Dr. Michael Fiore attended a meeting on the US Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposed rule to make all public housing smoke-free at the White House in Washington, DC. At the meeting, a panel of HUD housing managers and residents discussed potential struggles that could occur once the rule is effective. Fiore said experts in attendance agreed …
Research shows three medications combined with coaching to quit smoking—a pill called varenicline (Chantix), the nicotine patch alone, and a combination of nicotine-replacement medications—helped about the same percentage of participants to quit smoking. These results, from the Wisconsin Smokers’ Health Study 2 (WSHS 2), are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). …
Dr. Jessica Cook, presentation, Smoking and Psychopathology: Mechanisms and Treatments. For both those with PTSD and those in the control group, smoking a cigarette with or without nicotine reduced the negative emotional response to the stressor. Also, consistent findings across diagnostic groups suggest that smoking motivational processes, at least with regard to emotional modulation, may be …
Researchers have identified an enzyme associated with how addicted a smoker is to nicotine, and it could suggest new paths to designing medications to help smokers quit. UW-CTRI Director of Research Dr. Tim Baker and researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered for the first time that nicotine dependence is associated in part with …
UW-CTRI researcher Dr. Jess Cook has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure. The appointment will be effective July 1. Cook first joined UW-CTRI in 2008 as an assistant professor. She is also a clinical psychologist at the William S. Middleton Memorial VA, where she treats veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. “When I joined UW-CTRI, …
Intensive counseling with smokers that have psychiatric histories may not lead to higher abstinence rates, according to a new paper by UW-CTRI researchers. Whereas the original outcome paper, published in Addiction, supports the combined use of pre-quit nicotine gum and intensive in-person counseling in all smokers, the current paper sheds light on how multiple intervention …
Back in 2013, former UW-CTRI Clinic Manager Sophie Rodrigues-Pereira interviewed participant Jeffrey Grise as part of the Dual Use Study. Vaping electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) didn’t affect the level of smoking or carbon monoxide levels in study participants, according to findings to be published by UW-CTRI researchers in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. UW-CTRI, led by …