Formas inovadoras e tecnológicas de cessação do tabagismo

Abstract

Smoking is one of the biggest threats to public health worldwide, killing more than 8 million people each year. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of face-to-face interventions for smoking cessation, they have a high cost of implementation and maintenance. Furthermore, studies show that only a small portion of smokers use them. New and promising cessation strategies are emerging on the market and they need to be tested. Thus, this thesis is divided into two studies. Study 1. Objective: To describe the effectiveness of a web-based intervention for smoking cessation compared to the brief intervention. Methods: Pilot longitudinal study, with follow-ups after 1 and 3 months. Smokers over 18 years old were recruited between August 2018 and March 2019 (N = 49; 24 allocated to the web-based intervention group and 25 to the brief intervention group). Thirtyfive participants responded to follow-up 1 and 19 responded to the second. The results showed similar rates of cessation and reduction for both intervention groups. Conclusions: The Internetbased intervention was slightly more effective for smoking cessation, while the brief intervention was more effective in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked per day. Despite this, this difference was small and had no statistical significance. These results should be interpreted with caution, mainly due to the small sample size. Study 2. Objective: To describe the characteristics of electronic cigarette users and compare their intentions to stop using electronic cigarettes between two countries. Methods: Online cross-sectional study. Electronic cigarette users over the age of 18 and living in the USA or the UK were recruited through a crowdsourcing platform (N = 1,044; 524 in the UK and 520 in the USA). Results: Most respondents in the UK (61.6%) and the USA (61.3%) intended to stop using electronic cigarettes at some point. Adjusted analyzes found that future plans to quit smoking were significantly different across countries, with US respondents planning to quit generally sooner. Conclusions: Most vapers intend to quit, but US respondents plan to quit sooner than UK respondents. This may be due to UK policies recommending the use of e-cigarettes as a cessation aid, US policies related to e-cigarette regulation and marketing, and the epidemic of ecigarette-related lung disease in the US.