Wednesday, September 3, 2014

ActionToQuit Releases New Tobacco Cessation Guide for the Armed Forces



Partnership for Prevention's ActionToQuit initiative released a new guide, Help Your Patients Quit Tobacco Use: An Implementation Guide for the Armed Forces. The guide makes the case that tobacco cessation treatment should be a standard of care at every patient encounter and it lays out steps for treatment facilities to integrate tobacco cessation services into clinical practice. In addition, it spotlights military treatment facilities and health promotion and wellness centers across the United States for their exceptional commitment to assisting service members, veterans, and their families to break-free from tobacco addiction. This resource can be used as a practical tool to supplement the VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline on Management of Tobacco Use (2008). 

CDC study finds more than a quarter-million youth who had never smoked a cigarette have tried e-cigarettes



Tuesday, September 2, 2014

CDC study finds more than a quarter-million youth
who had never smoked a cigarette have tried e-cigarettes

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-authored study* found that in 2013, 263,000 young people who had never smoked had used e-cigarettes, compared with 79,000 in 2011. For the study, CDC researchers analyzed data from the 2011, 2012, and 2013 National Youth Tobacco Surveys of middle and high school students to assess associations between e-cigarette use and smoking intentions among U.S. youth who had never smoked conventional cigarettes.

For this analysis, researchers used established methods to identify youth who are classified as having smoking intentions. Youth who reported they would definitely not smoke in the next year and reported they would definitely not smoke if offered a cigarette by a friend were defined as not having an intention to smoke. All others were classified as having positive intention to smoke conventional cigarettes. Previous research has demonstrated that these youth are more likely to initiate smoking in the future.

Other key findings of the study include:

·         Ever users of e-cigarettes were almost twice as likely to have smoking intentions than never users of e-cigarettes, 43.9% compared with 21.5%.
·         As shown in previous studies, the greater the number of advertising sources (internet, magazine and newspaper, retail environment, and television or movies) to which young people were exposed, the more likely they are to be at risk for initiation of smoking: 
§  13% of students who said they had no exposures to such ads had smoking intentions
§  20.4% among those who reported exposures from one to two ad sources
§  25.6% among those who reported exposures from three to four ad sources.

There is evidence that nicotine’s adverse effects on adolescent brain development could result in lasting deficits in cognitive function.  Nicotine is highly addictive.  About three out of every four teen smokers become adult smokers, even if they intend to quit in a few years.  Each day, more than 3,200 American youth smoke their first cigarette.  The Surgeon General has concluded that unless the smoking rate is rapidly reduced, 5.6 million American children alive today – about one in every 13—will die prematurely from a smoking-related disease.

The National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) is an annual survey conducted by CDC in collaboration with FDA to provide national data on long-term, intermediate, and short-term indicators key to the design, implementation, and evaluation of comprehensive tobacco prevention and control programs. The NYTS also serves as a baseline for comparing progress toward meeting selected Healthy People 2020 goals for reducing tobacco use among adolescents.

More than 50 years since the landmark Surgeon General’s Report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States, killing nearly half a million Americans every year.  More than 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease.  Smoking-related diseases cost Americans $132 billion a year in direct health care expenses, much of which comes in taxpayer-supported payments. 

For additional information on CDC’s work to prevent smoking and tobacco use, please visit www.cdc.gov/tobacco or contact Jennifer Greaser at JGreaser@cdc.gov.

* Access to the full publication is available only by subscription.  A CDC summary of the paper’s findings is here: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/youth/e-cigarettes/index.htm


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Tobacco Cessation and Private Insurance under ACA:



Tobacco Cessation and Private Insurance under ACA: New Opportunities for Public Health
When: September 25, 2014
Time: 3pm Eastern – 4pm Eastern

Join the American Lung Association and its partners on September 25th at 3pm eastern for an interactive webinar about the recent federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) guidance on tobacco cessation coverage in insurance plans and what that means for the public health community. The guidance specifies that plans cover all seven FDA-approved tobacco cessation medications and all three forms of counseling with no cost sharing or prior authorization.

The webinar will feature experts from the American Lung Association’s National Office as well as other experts to provide an overview of what the new guidance means, what states and insurance regulators can & are doing about it and next steps you can take. The webinar will also highlight a toolkit of materials the American Lung Association has created on this topic. Click here to register. Please contact Anne DiGiulio with any questions at anne.digiulio@lung.org.

REgistration open for Rutgers Tobacco Training



NEW DATES ADDED for 2015
November 13 & 14, 2014
March 24 & 25, 2015


ONLINE Registration is Open

Study on Concurrent Smoking cessation and Addiction Treatment

A new study examines the efficacy of concurrent smoking cessation and addiction treatment for stimulant-dependent individuals. The results suggest that providing smoking cessation treatment to illicit stimulant-dependent individuals in outpatient addiction treatment settings will not worsen, and may enhance, abstinence from non-nicotine substance use. 
 
A randomized trial of concurrent smoking-cessation and substance use disorder treatment in stimulant-dependent smokers.
J Clin Psychiatry. 2014 Apr;75(4):336-43. doi: 10.4088/JCP.13m08449.