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Kicking the Habit Online

Posted on: Wednesday, 23 April 2003, 06:00 CDT

Study says Web sites may help smokers quit

HealthScoutNews -- Web sites designed to help smokers kick the habit have the potential to be powerful smoking-cessation tools, says a study in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

Researchers at the Oregon Research Institute developed their own Web site to test methods to recruit smokers to such Web sites and to help smokers quit smoking.

The study enrolled more than 600 smokers (77 percent of them smoked at least 16 cigarettes a day) by listing the Web site with major Web search engines, placing banner advertisements and posting information about the Web site to Internet-based smoking-cessation discussion groups.

The researchers also distributed brochures at doctors' offices, placed newspaper ads, and received newspaper and radio media coverage.

The Web site included a guide to help smokers develop a personalized plan to quit smoking, a chat room and an ask-the-expert area. It also included a library of pamphlets, motivations materials and Web links.

The site had an average of 108 logins per day over the six-month study period. The most successful recruitment tools were the listings on the search engines and postings to user groups. The newspaper ads were successful, but only for a short period.

The social support section of the Web site was the most popular, while the library was the second most popular. The majority of people who visited the Web site were women.

Several hundred people responded to the three-month follow-up survey, and 32 percent of those people reported that they quit smoking. But when the researchers included people who didn't respond to the follow-up survey as current smokers, the overall quit rate for the entire group dropped to 18 percent.

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Oregon Research Institute

Smoking cessation

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