Your Phone Could Help You Hang Up on Smoking

Can your telephone allow you to give up smoking? That is the aim of a challenge backed by the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

The CU Most cancers Heart and its companions are reaching out to individuals who smoke cigarettes and vape in Colorado to supply a smartphone app {that a} examine has proven might help them give up.

Jan Lowery, PhD, MPH, assistant director for dissemination and implementation for the CU Most cancers Heart’s Office of Community Outreach and Engagement, is heading up the challenge for the middle.

Individuals are given entry to a smartphone app referred to as 2Morrow Well being, which makes use of a behavioral mannequin referred to as “acceptance and commitment therapy.” The CU Most cancers Heart has bought a 12-month license permitting to supply the 2Morrow program totally free, Lowery stated.

Ideas, emotions, and urges

As described by the app’s supplier, the app helps “members be taught cutting-edge methods which might be efficient when coping with unhelpful ideas, emotions, and urges that get in the best way of long-term success (of stopping smoking). The personalised expertise is non-public and non-judgmental with each day classes, messaging, and customised suggestions. Individuals can even message a reside coach for further help.”

“As an alternative of instructing avoidance of triggers” as a smoking-cessation technique, Lowery stated, the app “teaches individuals how to deal with these triggers as they arrive. For instance, in the event that they’re sitting in a bar, and others are smoking, they will confront these triggers and discover ways to deal with them.”

The challenge began over the summer time in mountain counties and southeast Colorado, areas of the state with higher-than-average smoking charges, stated Lowery, a most cancers epidemiologist. She stated that whereas Colorado’s smoking-prevalence charge of 12% is barely decrease than the nationwide common of 14% as of 2020, in some areas of the state it’s as excessive as 25% amongst adults.

“There’s nice variability throughout our state, geographically,” she stated. “However there’s additionally variability amongst racial and ethnic teams. Hispanic and Black populations have increased smoking prevalence in comparison with whites in Colorado. We additionally see increased prevalence amongst individuals who’re uninsured.”

The 2Morrow app presents three modules: One centered on grownup smoking, one other on pregnant ladies, and a 3rd on vaping – using e-cigarettes, which is a specific concern relating to youths.

A screenshot of the 2Morrow Well being smartphone app. Picture: 2Morrow Inc.

Self-paced and personal

Key companions within the outreach effort embrace Donna Starck, director of a nine-county Tobacco Control Program organized out of the Otero County Well being Division, and Jamie Fanselow, a “regional well being connector” for Clear Creek, Gilpin, and Park counties with the Front Range Area Health Education Center. This system is spreading the phrase by distributing flyers at neighborhood occasions with a QR code for the app, in addition to through social media posts and thru faculties.

Lowery factors out that the app is “self-paced, so members can undergo this system on their very own timeline. And there’s privateness afforded through the use of a telephone app. You do not have to speak to somebody or go right into a smoking cessation class. And folks don’t must journey to a category, which is usually a barrier in rural areas, particularly in wintertime. It’s also provided in Spanish.”

Info on this system’s attain and affect, she stated, is collected by the app because it’s getting used, together with information on whether or not customers have tried to give up smoking and for a way lengthy.

Lowery and her group hope to broaden this system throughout Colorado. “We intend to succeed in out to different public well being departments and neighborhood companions to see if that is one thing they’d like to supply to their communities. The profit for these communities is that it is free and it supplies another choice for individuals who want to give up.”

Interesting to values

The stakes for any smoking-cessation effort are excessive. Tobacco use is the main preventable explanation for most cancers and most cancers deaths. Cigarette smoking is the No. 1 risk factor for lung cancerand is linked to about 80% to 90% of U.S. lung most cancers deaths. Smoking shouldn’t be solely linked to lung most cancers but additionally to cancers of the mouth and throat, voice field, abdomen, esophagus, pancreas, kidney, liver, cervix, bladder, colon and rectum, and a sort of leukemia.

And whereas the well being impacts of vaping are much less effectively documented, it’s recognized that the nicotine in e-cigarettes can harm adolescent brain developmentand there’s proof that younger individuals who vape could also be extra more likely to take up cigarette smoking.

The 2Morrow app was previously branded as ICanQuit. A medical trial by scientists at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Most cancers Analysis Heart, published in 2020 in JAMA Inner Drugs, discovered that members utilizing the ICanQuit app, designed round acceptance and dedication remedy, have been one and a half occasions extra more likely to give up smoking than these utilizing a unique app centered on instructing customers to keep away from smoking triggers.

“Acceptance and dedication remedy teaches abilities for permitting urges to smoke to move with out smoking, which is conceptually distinct from … approaches that educate avoidance of urges,” the 2020 examine stated. “Acceptance and dedication remedy motivates people who smoke to give up by interesting to their values, whereas (different) approaches inspire through the use of motive and logic.”

Lowery emphasised that the challenge “shouldn’t be meant to compete with different efficient smoking-cessation applications, just like the QuitLinewhich has been profitable in Colorado for a few years. The aim actually is to offer a substitute for complement all of the work that different applications have carried out in Colorado.”