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ABSTRACT
To reverse the present stagnation in progress toward reduced smoking rates, new widely accessible treatment methods for smoking cessation must be developed and evaluated with large groups of smokers.
We tested the feasibility of conducting a smoking cessation study over the Internet using a brief, self-help educational intervention. Through a direct e-mail sent from a large health information web site (WebMD), and with our presence on the Internet, we recruited 538 adult smokers to the study.
Most participants (90.5%) completed all baseline questionnaires. Questionnaires showed acceptable to good reliability and were comparable with studies using paper-and-pencil methods. Participants appeared to be highly dependent on nicotine. Forty-two percent indicated being ready to quit smoking at baseline. At 1-month follow-up, 42.8% of baseline participants returned a complete follow-up questionnaire, 40% of whom indicated having made a serious quit attempt, and 8.3% of whom indicated 7-day abstinence. Most follow-up participants rated the site as at least somewhat helpful to quitting (74.9%) and reported at least a slight increased intention to quit smoking over baseline (67.3%).
While Internet-enabled self-help interventions for smoking cessation are able to reach large numbers of smokers interested in quitting smoking, additional procedures are needed to retain these users for treatment and follow-up assessments.
The authors are sincerely indebted to Holly Jimison, MD, and WebMD for facilitating the recruitment of study participants. This study also was supported by grant #7RT-005 from the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program (Ricardo F. Muñoz, Principal Investigator) to the University of California, San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital, Latino Mental Health Research Program; and by a postdoctoral fellowship to Jackie Stoddard funded by grant #NIH P50DA09253 from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (Sharon M. Hall, P.I.) to the University of California, San Francisco Tobacco Research Center. Erik Augustson was supported by a National Cancer Institute Cancer Prevention Fellowship within the Division of Cancer Prevention, Office of Prevention Oncology.