Misconceptions can hamper smoking treatment efforts

Viewing nicotine addiction as a chronic disease and treating it as such could yield good results.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. July 17, 2006.

Washington -- Smokers, and even their physicians, harbor many misperceptions about effective treatments that could help them kick their habits if only they would use them. But rather than turning to nicotine replacement therapies, telephone quit lines or counseling, most smokers try to go it alone -- and fail.

Some erroneously believe that the nicotine contained in a patch, lozenge or gum causes cancer, so why trade one cancer-causing agent for another? Others think -- incorrectly -- that the nicotine replacement products themselves are addictive and balk at switching to a new habit. Then there are those who think the function of a quit line is to harangue them into stopping. Not true.

"Smokers tend to start out thinking that the treatment is worse than the disease," said Jack Henningfield, PhD, professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. Thus, the treatments sit on the shelf and the phone lines are idle, several experts said.

A panel of physicians and behavioral scientists recently convened at a National Institutes of Health state-of-the-science meeting on smoking prevention and cessation. Their June 14 report concluded that successful cessation rates could double or triple if effective treatments were utilized.

Tobacco use remains the nation's leading preventable cause of premature death. Each year more than 440,000 Americans die from disease caused by tobacco use, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the estimated 44.5 million adult smokers and 3.75 million high school student smokers in the United States, 70% say they would like to quit, and 40% try each year, but the quit rate remains very low.