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We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: An opt-out smoking cessation program referred hundreds of patients to counseling and medication. Many patients reported abstinence, an attempted quit or smoking reduction. When a patient with cancer tells their clinician they smoke, Andrea C. King, PhD, wants alarm bells to ring inside the exam room \u2014 figuratively speaking. \u201cHelping patients to quit smoking should be a standard of care,\u201d King, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at The University of Chicago, told Healio.
The No Smoker Left Behind initiative at The University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center aims to make that a reality. The opt-out program proactively reaches out to all patients with cancer listed as current smokers in the electronic health record (EHR) and subsequently offers a variety of cessation options. A retrospective analysis of the program\u2019s first 6 years found almost 900 patients received counseling and\/or medication referrals, and more than half who responded to follow-up indicating they made a smoking quit attempt in the past month with nearly one-third reporting at least 8 days of abstinence or a meaningful reduction in cigarettes smoked per day. \u201cWe are going to help people,\u201d King said. \u201cWe are going to repeatedly help you to try to find a way to reduce and quit smoking.\u201d Changing smoking habits \u2018crucial\u2019 Tobacco use causes 28% of all cancer deaths in the U.S., according to study background. Among patients diagnosed with a malignancy in 2023, 14.7% reported being current smokers. Healio previously reported tobacco to be the leading preventable cause of cancers globally, accounting for 15% of 7.1 million cases in 2022 attributed to modifiable risk factors. Healio also has reported patients who quit smoking after a diagnosis halved their risk for death compared with those who continued to smoke. Overall, reductions in cigarette smoking between 1970 and 2022 prevented nearly 4 million lung cancer deaths. \u201cHelping patients who have cancer to quit smoking and make a change in their smoking behavior is crucial, and yet it\u2019s been ignored or sidelined far too long,\u201d King said. \u201cThere are a variety of reasons why.\u201d More than 71% of American College of Surgeons\u2019 Commission on Cancer\u2013accredited cancer programs advise patients to stop smoking, but only 18.2% provide counseling and just 17.6% prescribe approved medications. \u201cThere are many good reasons to help people to quit smoking, and yet there were few systematic programs in cancer centers across the country,\u201d King said. \u201cAt University of Chicago, before we started this program, we were just like most other centers. It was a bit \u2018catch as catch can\u2019 in terms of action steps to help cancer patients connect to approved treatments to help them quit smoking.\u201d If there was a moment during a provider visit, and enough time to even engage in the conversation, the patient might have been provided a prescription or referral to our group-based program, but it wasn\u2019t done across the board.\u201d King and colleagues wanted to develop a \u201cbigger, more sustainable\u201d program to reach a larger group of people, which led to the No Smoker Left Behind initiative. Patients receive emails, phone calls and text messages about treatment options, and to select as many as they want, including referrals to discuss medications, and referrals to King\u2019s in-house telehealth group program, as well as state telephone quitline resources and\/or a text-messaging program by the National Cancer Institute. \u201cThis program is automatically delivered to every patient with cancer who is listed in the EHR as a smoker,\u201d King said. \u201cWe also offer repeated enrollments. If you were enrolled the first time, and you didn\u2019t quit for a variety of reasons, if 6 months later you had another outpatient visit, the system would automatically re-enroll you as we know quitting smoking is a process and may require repeated attempts for some. \u201cThis is an addiction like any other addiction,\u201d she added. \u201cPeople can relapse or may not meet their goals. We want to offer a menu of options repeatedly. We want to say we\u2019re not giving up on you; don\u2019t give up on yourself. We\u2019re going to continue to offer a variety of options as part of your cancer care.\u201d King and colleagues retrospectively analyzed the effectiveness of the program, for which 3,706 patients (mean age 62.1 years; standard deviation, 12; 57% men; 46.6% Black; 38.5% white) treated at The University of Chicago between 2019 and 2024 were eligible. \u2018Terrific\u2019 response Overall, 2,024 patients (54.6% of those attempted) were reached, meaning they responded to at least one contact attempt. Of those, 10.7% engaged with the program but did not select a treatment option, and 43.1% selected and were referred to one or more treatment options. \u201cTo get about half of patients to respond in this opt-out program is terrific,\u201d King said. The most common patient-selected cessation options included medication with counseling (70.6%), medication alone (14.8%) and a text-only program (8.8%). Among those referred for treatment, the most common referrals included counseling services (58%), medications alone (20.8%), and medications with counseling (11.5%). Black patients had higher referral rates than white patients (31.8% vs. 16.4%), but white patients had higher rates of self-reported abstinence (25.7% vs. 14.4%). Among 327 respondents to final, 6-month follow-up, 16.2% abstained from smoking for at least 8 days, 58.7% reported attempting to quit within the previous month, and 15% said they smoked less than at program enrollment. \u201cEven reducing the number of cigarettes smoked is a step in the right direction, but we don\u2019t want to stop there because we know there\u2019s no safe level of smoking,\u201d King said. Patients with smoking-related malignancies had significantly higher<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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