June 14, 2018 – Smoking Cessation

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Anchor lead: What works best to help smokers quit? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Many current smokers who are invited to make an attempt to quit turn down the invitation, a study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine shows. In fact, only 20% of the 6000 smokers queried joined in the study. Enid Neptune, a lung expert and tobacco activist at Johns Hopkins isn’t surprised.

Neptune: Some of it is a reflection of how inadequate our smoking cessation programs are in this country. When someone who is a lifelong smoker, when they hear we’d like for you to try our product to stop smoking I think they have a healthy degree of skepticism as to whether that’s even possible. What I do believe is that the vast majority of smokers with they hadn’t started, and the vast majority of smokers would like to quit.   :31

Neptune says we do know how to help smokers to quit but must take a multifactorial approach to improve the odds. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.