Smokers in England who want to stop smoking are three times more likely to succeed if they see a trained advisor than if they try by themselves, according to a new study published online today in the medical journal Addiction. Worryingly, just buying nicotine patches, gum or other licensed nicotine products from a shop does not seem to improve the chances of quitting.
This is the first study using population-based survey data that has been large enough to assess the real-world effectiveness of using National Health Service (NHS) stop-smoking services compared with quitting without help.
The study uses data from a very large ongoing UK research programme (the Smoking Toolkit Study - see http://www.smokinginengland.info) that has been surveying smokers and recent ex-smokers since 2007. The study published today in Addiction analyses survey responses from more than 10,000 people in England who had tried to quit smoking in the prior 12 months, to discover what methods of quitting had the highest success rates.
