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Proactive, personalized telephone counseling can help teen smokers to quit 

Personalized, proactive telephone counseling centered on motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral skills training has been found to favorably impact quit rates among teen smokers, according to a pair of studies published online October 12 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Arthur V. Peterson, Ph.D., and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and colleagues designed the Hutchinson Study of High School Smoking trial to evaluate to what extent telephone counseling could help teenagers quit smoking. The researchers proactively identified more than 2,000 smokers via classroom surveys of juniors in 50 high schools in Washington state. In 25 of the high schools, after parental approval teen smokers received personalized smoking cessation counseling that combined motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral skills training. These included using the smoker's own words and values to increase importance of quitting, anticipating and coping with stress and other triggers to smoke, and making plans for stopping. The study also included more than 700 nonsmokers to ensure that contacting students for participation in the trial would not reveal a participant's smoking status.

More than a year after the intervention began, nearly 89% of the students completed a follow-up survey in which 22% of intervened smokers reported 6-month prolonged abstinence from smoking, compared to 18% among students in the no-intervention control arm. There was also strong evidence that the intervention had made a difference for 3-month, 1-month, and 7-day abstinence and for the length of time since last cigarette.

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