This study was performed to develop a smoking cessation program which is pertinent to cultural context and applicable in outpatient settings in Korea, and to evaluate its efficacy. Subjects were 401 adult smoking patients who saw their doctors in the outpatient setting at a university hospital regardless of their willingness in smoking cessation. Physicians delivered a brief stop-smoking prompt to all patients who smoked one cigarette a day or more on the average. Then they referred them to on-site smoking counsclors(retired nurses) who provided a brief nurse-assisted intervention with a survey to a randomly assigned experiment, group(200 smoking patien(s), whom the counselors telephoned later to prevent relapse or promote the motivation to quit, or gave only a survey to control group(201 smoking patients). After at least 5 months, self-reported current smoking cessation was confirmed later using cut-off values as 7 ppm or less in expired alveolar air after breath holding by portable CO analyzer.
During 5 months, subjects in the experiment group were 1.20 times[95% confidence interval(CD; 1.04-1.401 more likely to report serious quit attempts than control group(69.5% vs 57.7%). After 5 months, subjects in the experiment group were 1.56 times (95% Cl; 0.89-2.73) more likely to quit smoking than control group (14.0% vs 9.09/0). Subgroup analysis by age revealed that subjects in the experiment group were 5.76 times(955/0, Cl; 1.34-24.74) more likely to quit smoking than control group out of 166 smoking patients who were 49 years or less old.
This study suggests that the developed smoking cessation program is effective for outpatients who are 49 years or less old to quit smoking. It may be applicable in the outpatient settings even before more reliable information accumulates.
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