Study: Kids' Doctors Can Help Parents Quit

Children's doctors can help parents get help in quitting smoking, a new study finds. Pediatricians have an interest in helping parents quit smoking in order to reduce children's risk from the smoke. The American Academy of Pediatrics supported the study. Doctors' offices in the study were randomly divided into two groups. All of the offices asked parents whether they were smokers. In half of the offices, doctors were asked to provide advice on quitting smoking. The program also included referrals to quitlines and prescriptions for nicotine replacement medicines. The other group of doctors just provided usual care to children. Nearly 1,000 parents were in each group. They were interviewed at the end of the office visit to assess what happened. Researchers found that 24% of the offices in the test program provided counseling on quitting smoking. The rate was 2% in the usual-care offices. In the first group, about 10% of parents enrolled in the quitline and 12% got nicotine prescriptions. The rate was zero for the usual-care group. The study did not follow up to see if parents actually quit. The journal Pediatrics published the study June 24.

By Claire McCarthy, M.D.
Harvard Medical School

What Is the Doctor's Reaction?

Pediatricians want parents who smoke to quit because quitting:

• Adds an average of seven years to a parent's life
• Removes most of their children's exposure to tobacco
• Removes all of the pregnancy risks linked with tobacco exposure
• Takes care of the major cause of deaths from house fires
• Makes it much less likely that teens will have access to cigarettes and become smokers themselves
• Makes more money available to families that need it (cigarettes are expensive)

Pediatricians may actually be among the best people to get parents to quit, too. Parents who smoke tend to not see their own doctors very often. But parents see their child's doctor an average of four times a year.

That's why researchers from the American Academy of Pediatrics were interested to see if children's doctors can give parents who smoke the information they need to help them quit. They started a program called CEASE in a bunch of practices. CEASE stands for Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure.

In this program, parents are routinely asked about smoking. If they smoke, the doctor talks to them about it and offers help. This can include either referrals or a prescription for nicotine gum or patches.

In the study, the researchers found that practices using this program were about 12 times more likely to give smoking parents help in quitting than practices that didn't. So clearly pediatricians can help parents stop smoking. What's less clear is whether the parents will actually stop.

What Changes Can I Make Now?

If you are a parent who smokes, consider these facts:

• Half of smokers will die of an illness caused by smoking.
• Nonsmokers who are exposed to cigarette smoke at home or work increase their risk of lung cancer by 20% to 30%.
• Smoking during pregnancy and while your child is an infant increases the risk of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).
• Children whose parents smoke get sick more often than those whose parents don't smoke. They get more pneumonia, bronchitis and ear infections.
• Exposure to cigarette smoke can trigger asthma attacks.

Smoking is bad for you and for your child. There is help available. Visit the How to Quit website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), check out the CDC's Quit Smoking Resources or call 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

What Can I Expect Looking to the Future?

According to the CDC, 19% of U.S. adults smoke. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, causing 1 out of every 5 deaths. So cutting back on the number of smokers could make a huge difference when it comes to saving lives.

It could also make a huge difference in improving the current and future health of our children.

I hope that studies like this one will help us find better and more effective ways to make this difference.