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EDITORIAL: Helping Adolescent Smokers Quit: Can Telephone Quitlines Lead the Way?  

This study is remarkable for multiple reasons, not least because it is the first to show substantial quit rates in adolescent smokers at 6 months after quitting. Indeed, for those scientists not familiar with behavioral research, this study and the accompanying article on study design and implementation provide an outstanding example of how theory driven and methodologically sound behavioral research can be.

This complex and elegant design brings together a rich variety of "ingredients" that blend together into a scientific study that is very likely to set the standard for many years and will be a benchmark to which other similar studies will be compared. . . .

What are the implications of this study? Despite a few limitations, this research team has conducted an outstanding study and has discovered a treatment for daily adolescent smoking that is the new standard. Typically, those in the role of making decisions on which treatments to implement would wait for a replication before implementing a treatment protocol like the one used by Peterson et al. However, we believe that the outcomes of this study, plus the lack of good alternatives, warrant a more aggressive implementation plan.

More specifically, because smoking cessation quitlines in the United States receive core funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and there is the potential for substantial increases in that funding via economic stimulus funds, we have two strong recommendations. First, all state quitlines should be encouraged in the strongest possible way to implement the intervention investigated by Peterson et al. (3) to the extent feasible (recognizing that their intervention was quite complex), with the goal of increasing on a national scale the number of adolescents who quit smoking. Second, funding should be provided to both replicate the existing design and also investigate modifications of the protocol that would tease out the relative impact of specific components of the protocol.

At last, we have a new and promising foundation for youth tobacco cessation intervention that can serve both as a catalyst for future research as well as a community resource to address the immediate need of young daily smokers who wish to quit.

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