Nearly one-third of smokers who were offered smoking cessation support on the spot when they showed up for lung cancer screening remained off cigarettes 1 year later, a quit-smoking rate considerably higher than that reported in clinical studies, investigators from the United Kingdom found.
When they added a stop-smoking component to the Yorkshire Lung Screening Trial, Rachael Murray, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Nottingham (England), found that immediately offering a combination of behavioral support and pharmacotherapy to help smokers kick the habit resulted in a 7-day validated point prevalent abstinence rate at 3 months of 30% among smokers randomized to a standard smoking cessation program, and 33.6% among patients randomized to also receive a personalized intervention that included images of their heart and lungs to demonstrate the harmful effects of tobacco.
In contrast, smoking cessation rates reported in trials of lung cancer screening have ranged from approximately 10% to 20%.
Although there was no overall statistical difference in quit-smoking rates between the standard and enhanced intervention arms of the study, the investigators found that women, but not men, were significantly more likely to quit when shown the heart and lung images, compared with those who received the standard smoking cessation support, Dr. Murray said at the World Conference on Lung Cancer held this week in Vienna.
“I think having smoking cessation as an integrated part of the lung cancer track was really positively received by our participants, particularly through having a physical presence and being conveniently located within the setting,” she said in a presidential symposium highlighting the best abstracts presented at the meeting.
“We’ve offered a high-intensity intervention, which is not going to be cheap to offer but I think is really important for these individuals with complex smoking histories and multiple comorbidities,” she added.
No judgment
In an interview, Dr. Murray noted that colocating stop-smoking services with lung screening is important for capturing smokers who may have the will but not the means to quit, and that participants especially appreciated the offer of help without the usual condescending attitude.
“We’re not an add-on: We’re there and physically present at the time of the lung health check,” she said. “It’s a standard of care that our smoking cessation advisers are able to provide. It’s very nonjudgmental and very holistic, providing social support that these people need. They’ve got long smoking histories, and they’re often made to feel guilty for that, and just being able to approach them in a nonjudgmental way makes a big difference.”
Smoking cessation is known to be the most effective way to reduce lung cancer deaths, Dr. Murray said in her presentation, pointing to a 2020 study by University of Michigan researchers showing that adding tobacco treatment to lung cancer screening can reduce deaths by 14% and increase the overall number of life-years gained by 81%.
Reduce smoking?
To see whether adding a personalized on-site smoking cessation program to lung cancer screening could improve quit-smoking rates, Dr. Murray and colleagues enrolled 1,003 smokers who attended the lung cancer screening program and randomly assigned them to either the intervention arm with personalized feedback, supportive communications, ongoing behavioral support and pharmacotherapy, or to a control arm consisting of ongoing behavioral support and pharmacotherapy.
Participants in the intervention arm were shown CT scans of the heart and lungs plus drawings highlighting coronary artery calcification and areas of their lungs damaged by smoking, and information on how quitting smoking can help to improve their health. The smoking cessation advisers followed a tightly controlled script to ensure that the messages were delivered in a uniform fashion to all participants.
As noted before, rates of 7-day validated point prevalent abstinence, measured by exhaled carbon dioxide, were 33.8% in the intervention arm, and 30% in the control arm. The respective costs per quitter were £521.30 ($630.77) and £412.80 ($499.48).
The validated 12-month smoking-free rates were 29.% in the intervention arm, and 28.6% in the control arm. None of the differences were statistically significant.
However, when they looked at between-arm differences by sex, the investigators found that significantly more women assigned to the intervention arm remained abstinent at 3 months, with rates of 33.9% compared with 23.1% of controls, a difference that translated into an unadjusted odds ratio of 1.70 favoring the intervention among women (P = .008).
Effective and durable
“My interpretation of this study is that the abstinence rates were very high, and this in fact was durable because this effect was maintained after 12 months,” commented invited discussant and smoking cessation expert Jacek Jassem, MD, from the University of Gdansk (Poland).
He said that the lack of a difference between the intervention and control arms might be attributable to lower levels of concern about heart disease or emphysema among participants, or possibly to the efficacy of the on-site support program itself.
The differences in efficacy of the intervention between men and women suggest that there may be a need for a sex- or gender-adapted approach, he said at the conference sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
“Lung cancer screening is a unique opportunity to motivate smoking cessation. All cancer screening programs should included best available and ongoing cessation support, and please, don’t blame smoking persons: Be compassionate, and helpful, and smile like our British colleagues did,” he concluded.
The study was supported by Yorkshire Cancer Research. Dr. Murray and Dr. Jassem reported no financial conflicts of interest.