University of Wisconsin–Madison

Providers: Best Ways to Help Adolescents Quit Vaping

A female clinician counsels a female teen on how to quit vaping

Adolescent Care Providers: If you have an upcoming appointment with an adolescent who vapes or smokes, here’s your site to quickly brush up on how to treat tobacco use.

A.C.T. to Promote Adolescent Cessation 

  • Ask: Screen for tobacco use with all adolescents, during every clinical encounter. 
  • Counsel: Advise all adolescents who use tobacco to quit and have them set a quit date within two weeks.
  • Treat: According to a Cochrane systematic review of all research studies available from peer-reviewed journals, there are two treatments that appear to help people quit vaping:
    • Text message support may help more young people (13 to 24 years of age) stop vaping than no/minimal support.
    • Varenicline may also help people quit vaping. In fact, in one study published in JAMA, half of people who took varenicline quit vaping. For more on varenicline, click here.
    • There was not enough information to say whether other interventions could help people stop vaping.
  • Your patients can get:
    • A prescription for varenicline.
    • Free text support. Visit ExProgram.com. Or, in Wisconsin, just text “VAPEFREE” to 873373.

Deeper Dive – More Information

A doctor counsels a patient to quit tobacco use

Here’s what the evidence says:

  1. American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) Youth Tobacco Cessation: Considerations for Clinicians. This brief, free, practical guide is designed to support pediatric health clinicians in screening patients for tobacco use and providing behavioral and pharmacological support to help adolescents quit smoking, vaping or chewing tobacco.
    • The resource uses an easy, 3-step model, “Ask-Counsel-Treat (ACT),” to guide clinical interactions around cessation.
    • AAP Youth Tobacco Cessation Case Studies
    • Youth Tobacco Cessation Progressive Web App (PWA). This PWA is intended to assist health personnel in supporting youth tobacco cessation by delivering the Ask-Counsel-Treat model in a tool designed for use within a clinical encounter. Designed for multi-system use, the PWA can be utilized on a computer, tablet or offline mobile app. To use it, click here.
  2. Check out the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations on helping adolescents quit tobacco use, or that of the American College of Preventive Medicine