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Lung Cancer Awareness Month is November each year 

Lung Cancer Awareness Month (LCAM) is a national campaign dedicated to increasing attention to lung cancer issues. By organizing rallies, distributing educational material, holding fund-raising events, contacting Congress, and speaking to the media, those involved in LCAM bring much-needed support and attention to a disease that each year kills more people than breast, prostate, colon and pancreas cancers combined.

Here's how you can participate!

Raise Awareness You can raise awareness about lung cancer where you live in many ways during November:

* Sponsor an event to bring your community together around lung cancer.

* Gain official attention for lung cancer with petitions, proclamations, and more!

* Distribute LCA's Public Service Announcement to local media

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• November Is Lung Cancer Awareness Month 

More people die from lung cancer than any other type of cancer. In 2004,* lung cancer accounted for more deaths than breast, prostate, and colon cancer combined. The most important thing you can do to prevent lung cancer is to not start smoking or to quit if you currently smoke.

In 2004,*

* 108,355 men and 87,897 women were diagnosed with lung cancer.†

* 89,575 men and 68,431 women died from lung cancer.†

Smoking and Secondhand Smoke

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Wenatchee teens take part in state smoking study  

Wenatchee High School students were part of a teen smoking study by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The study, published in mid-October, was the first time researchers proved that one-on-one counseling makes a significant difference in teen smoking rates.

“When this study started, despite decades of research and dozens of intervention trials, there was no proven way to reach teens from the general population and recruit them into smoking cessation programs, and there was no proven way to help these teens quit,” said lead researcher Arthur Peterson in a prepared statement.

Statewide, more than 2,000 students at 50 high schools participated in the study.

Half of the schools, including Wenatchee High School, were control schools. With parental consent, students from the Class of 2005 took a survey about smoking habits and attitudes during their junior year, and again in their senior year. . . .

By the end of the study, about 22 percent of the smokers in counseling had stopped smoking for six continuous months, compared to nearly 18 percent of smokers at the control high schools, according to a news release from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Intervention also increased three-month, one-month and seven-day smoking abstinence rates compared to the control group.

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Advocates Call for Treating Tobacco Dependence in Psychiatric Patients 

Smoking cessation services should be integrated into substance use disorder treatment programs, according to David Kalman, MD, Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts, and colleagues, in their recent review of tobacco dependency among patients who sought treatment for alcoholism.1

"Clearly there exist many barriers to simultaneous treatment of tobacco dependence and other substance use disorders," the investigators observe. "However, most alcoholics in treatment are concerned about their smoking and the preponderance of evidence indicates that trying to quit during substance use disorder treatment does not interfere with sobriety and, in fact, appears to be associated with better alcohol and other drug use outcomes." Kalman and colleagues are among a growing number of clinicians and researchers calling for the recognition of (and interventions for) tobacco dependence as a common comorbidity with other substance use and psychiatric disorders.

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Radioiodine, smoking linked to eye disease in Graves' hyperthyroidism 

Radioiodine therapy and smoking increase the risk of developing thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy in patients with Graves' hyperthyroidism, say researchers from Sweden in the October issue of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

"(We should) include radioiodine treatment and smoking as risk factors for ophthalmopathy, in the decision making process for a patient with Graves' disease," Dr. Frank Traisk from Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, told Reuters Health.

Dr. Traisk and colleagues compared radioiodine treatment (163 patients) and medical therapy (150 patients) for long-term worsening or development of thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy in Graves' hyperthyroidism.

De novo thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy was significantly more common in the iodine-131 group (38%) than in the medical therapy group (18%), the authors report.

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CHEST: Novel LABA Improves Lung Function in COPD 

Indacaterol, an investigational long-acting beta2-agonist, showed benefits over both placebo and salmeterol (Serevent) for moderate-to-severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a randomized trial, researchers reported here.

Through 26 weeks, the drug significantly improved bronchodilation, health status, and dyspnea over both control arms, although the benefits reached clinical importance over the placebo group only, according to Oliver Kornmann, MD, of Mainz University Hospital in Germany.

Indacaterol "shows a trend toward improvement over salmeterol," he reported at the American College of Chest Physicians meeting.

Action Points

* Explain to interested patients that indacaterol has not been approved in either the U.S. or Europe.

* Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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Ingrid Newkirk: Using Dollar Bills to Light Cigarettes 

With the national debt in the trillions, the U.S. government is still letting money go up in smoke.

For decades now, we’ve known that those men in the white coats who were employed by tobacco companies to appear on TV and tell us that smoking soothed a scratchy throat were not telling us the whole truth. In the 1970s, epidemiology conclusively linked smoking in pregnant women to fetal harm. Since then, every medical organization, the U.S. Surgeon General, and even tobacco companies themselves have advised us to stay away from the smokes, and most strongly warned that women should not smoke during pregnancy.

The federal government, meanwhile, is still funding studies in which stressed monkeys are locked inside metal cages, impregnated, and injected with nicotine; have their babies taken away from them after birth; have lung function tests performed on them; and are then killed. And should you think this is the government foolishly trying to prove for the umpteenth time what we already know - in this case about tobacco and nicotine - it is not. It is to see if women can keep on smoking and have babies too! . . .

The money is considerable. Spindel’s recent NIH grants include $1.3 million to test fetal nicotine exposure in rhesus monkeys, $1.8 million to study the mechanisms that nicotine uses to harm the fetuses of mutant mice, and his share of the $11 million annual support grant for the primate center. Meanwhile, only three states—Maine, Delaware, and Mississippi—fund tobacco prevention programs at the minimum levels recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia fund such programs at less than half the CDC minimum or provide no state funding at all.

The expense is not only borne by us taxpayers and the animals who pay with their lives in such disgusting tests, but by the women and children who are ill served by foolish funding priorities.

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• State Medicaid Coverage for Tobacco-Dependence Treatments --- United States, 2007 

The prevalence of tobacco use among adults in the United States has been reduced by half since the 1960s (1,2). Despite this progress, low-income populations, such as Medicaid enrollees, continue to smoke at substantially higher rates than the general population (33% versus 20%) (1). The Public Health Service's Clinical Practice Guideline (2) and the Partnership for Prevention's Call for ACTTION (3) recommend comprehensive insurance coverage of tobacco-dependence treatments without barriers such as copayments, limitations in duration of treatment, prior authorization, and stepped-care therapy. Healthy People 2010 aims to expand coverage of evidence-based treatments for nicotine dependency to all 51 Medicaid programs (objective 27-8b) (4). To monitor progress toward that objective, in 2007, the Center for Health and Public Policy Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, surveyed all 51 Medicaid programs. This report summarizes the results of that survey, which found that 43 (84%) programs offered coverage for some form of tobacco-dependence treatment to Medicaid enrollees in traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicaid, with four Medicaid programs adding coverage since 2006 and 20 programs adding coverage in the past decade. Only two states (New Mexico and New Jersey) reported access to tobacco-dependence treatments without any limitations or restrictions. Of the 25 states covering pharmacotherapy for Medicaid enrollees in both FFS and managed-care organizations (MCOs), only 13 covered the same tobacco-dependence treatments for enrollees in both populations. Research demonstrates that providing access to comprehensive tobacco-dependence treatments increases quit rates. Providing Medicaid coverage for these treatments would ensure that all enrollees can access and benefit from these treatments.

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• Most state Medicaid programs offer limited access to tobacco-dependence treatment 

Medicaid coverage for various smoking cessation treatments is limited in most states, according to a report published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly.

Although smoking rates in the United States have been reduced by half since the 1960s, smoking rates among low-income adults are higher than in the general population (33% vs. 20%). According to the report, 43 of 51 (84%) state Medicaid programs offer some form of tobacco-dependence treatment in a traditional fee-for-service manner. Twenty Medicaid programs have added coverage over the last decade and four Medicaid programs have added coverage since 2006. Of the 43 programs that offered tobacco-dependence therapies, 41 placed some form of limitation on the coverage in the form of copayments (32 states), limiting duration of treatment (25 states), requiring prior authorization (21 states) and requiring enrollment in behavioral modification programs as a precondition for receiving pharmacotherapy (13 states). Only New Jersey and New Mexico offered access to tobacco-dependence treatments with no limitations or restrictions on coverage.

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Tobacco Quit line Helps First Half-Million Callers 

A free telephone service that helps Californians kick the smoking habit - funded by tobacco taxes approved by California voters and operated by the University of California, San Diego - reached a milestone today as the 500,000th person called for service.

1-800-NO-BUTTS, also known as the California Smokers' Helpline, has been helping callers since 1992, when it became the nation's first statewide "quit line." Today, all 50 states offer similar services as part of efforts to reduce tobacco's toll on the public health.

"The fact that half a million Californians have called for help shows how badly people want to quit," said Christopher Anderson, program director for the Helpline. "When you see a person who's still smoking, despite all the information about negative health effects, you might think they don't want to quit. But, more often than not, they just don't know how to go about it or don't feel confident in their ability to quit. We help them come up with a good plan and stick to it."

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'Light' Cigarettes Hurt Quit-Smoking Effort 

Want to quit smoking? Your chances may be better if you don't switch to a "light," "ultra-light," or "low-tar" cigarette before you try.

In a newly published study, smokers who traded in their so-called "full-flavor" cigarettes for cigarettes with these labels made more attempts to kick the habit than other smokers, but were almost half as likely to actually do it.

Health officials have long recognized that brands labeled light, ultra-light, mild, and low-tar are no less likely than other cigarettes to cause smoking-related diseases like lung cancer and heart disease; that's because people tend to smoke more of them and inhale more deeply.

But it has not been clear if making the switch to these '"light" brands had an impact on smoking-cessation rates.

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2008 New Zealand
Tobacco Use Survey: Quitting Results (PDF) 

Key Points

Introduction

This report presents the quitting results of 15–64-year-olds from the 2008 New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey (NZTUS), including, where possible, comparisons with the 2006 NZTUS.

Quitting attempts

In 2008 an estimated19,600 New Zealanders had quit smoking in the previous 6–12 months.

Three out of five current smokers had tried to quit smoking in the past five years, a third of smokers had quit for at least 24 hours in the past 12 months and a fifth had successfully quit for a week before starting to smoke again.

Four out of five current smokers said that they would not smoke if they had their life over again.

Three-quarters of smokers who had tried to quit in the past 12 months said one of the reasons was for their own health, while a third had tried to quit because of the cost of smoking.

Quitting services and programmes

Among current smokers, three-quarters had been asked their smoking status by a health care worker in the past 12 months.

Māori and Pacific people and those from areas of high deprivation were more likely than the total New Zealand population aged 15–64 years and those from the least deprived areas respectively to have been asked their smoking status by a health care worker over the past 12 months.

Over a quarter (27.6%) of 15–64-year-old current smokers had been given advice or information, referred to quitting programmes or given quitting aids by a health care worker in the past 12 months.

Māori current smokers were two-fifths more likely than all current smokers aged
15–64, and current smokers living in the most deprived areas were twice as likely as those in the least deprived areas to have been provided with advice or information, referred to quitting programmes or given quitting aids by a health care worker in the past 12 months.

A third of people who had tried to quit smoking in the past 12 months (‘recent quit attempters’) had used quitting products or advice in their most recent quit attempt. The most common product used was nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) (19.5%). Quitline was used by one in eight, and general practitioners were used by 6% of recent quit attempters.

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2008 New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey-Quitting Results 

Summary of publication

New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey 2008: Quitting results, focussing on the quitting behaviour of current smokers, is the second report based on the New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey 2008 (NZTUS 2008) data.

The first report, Tobacco Trends 2008: A brief update of tobacco use in New Zealand was released in June 2009.

This report presents data directly related to smokers’ history of quitting smoking, their reasons for quitting, the products, services and advice they’ve used, and their awareness and knowledge of the different health effects of nicotine and tobacco.

Baseline data for monitoring the implementation of the New Zealand Smoking Cessation Guidelines are presented in this report. The data can also be used to monitor progress towards one of the six Health Targets, Better help for smokers to quit, that came into effect on 1 July 2009.

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• Survey shows most NZ smokers want to quit 

The 2008 New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey: Quitting Results published today shows overwhelmingly most smokers want to quit, Associate Minister of Health Hon Tariana Turia said.

Minister Turia said that helping smokers to quit was a priority for the Government and was one of the six health targets.

This report presents the quitting results of 15 to 64 year olds from the 2008 New Zealand Tobacco Use Survey, including where possible, in comparison with the previous survey (2006).

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• Quitting smoking isn't child's play. Or is it? 

In a few years if you see a person nervously blowing on his cellphone for five minutes, do not call the cops. He might not be a crazy person who forgot to take his meds; he might just be a smoker trying to quit smoking.

Columbia University's Teachers College announced today that it received a $150,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, through the foundation's Health Games Research national program to develop a smart phone app that emulates the physiological responses smokers get from smoking.

The first apps are likely to be for Apple Inc.'s iPhone or iPod Touch. The user would control the game by blowing into the device's microphone in response to different color and sound stimuli coming from the handset. Researchers hope that it will be able to elicit the same brain patterns, heart rate levels and relaxation responses that smokers get from smoking. The game, Lit: A Game Intervention for Nicotine Smokers, is expected to be released in about two years.

Breath therapy has been used to help smokers quit smoking for a while . . .

Technology is being used in another way to help smokers quit smoking. Researchers at the GRAP Occupational Psychology Clinic and the University of Quebec in Gatineau recently found that smokers who crushed virtual cigarettes experienced a significant reduction in nicotine

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