Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of both premature deaths overall and cancer deaths in the US. Most smokers visit a healthcare setting each year, providing an unequaled opportunity to intervene. Yet, most smokers do not receive highly effective cessation treatment during their healthcare visits.
To improve the effectiveness of smoking treatment in healthcare, this project will identify the most promising combination nicotine replacement therapy (C-NRT) regimens and which counseling strategy is most helpful for use in primary care patients who are ready to quit. To evaluate these treatments, the study will examine whether participants have quit after one year (biochemically confirmed) and how much it cost.
This project will recruit 608 participants from primary care clinics in two Wisconsin health systems, Aurora Health Care in the Milwaukee area and UW Health in the Madison, Wisconsin area. Those who want to quit smoking will be randomized to receive one of two levels of each of three factors:
- Preparation C-NRT (4 weeks vs. Standard).
- C-NRT Duration (Extended [24 weeks] vs. Standard [12 weeks]).
- Counseling Modality (Phone Counseling vs. mHealth Coaching).
The proposed research builds on UW-CTRI’s expertise and prior research findings to address how best to use the most effective quit-smoking medications in real-world healthcare settings. This research will use an efficient and innovative methodology (i.e., the Multiphase Optimization Strategy) to identify the most promising treatments to use with primary care patients who smoke. These optimized treatments will then be evaluated in a randomized clinical trial, BREATHE 2 Project 3: Optimization.
