Approximately one in five Americans are still active cigarette smokers, but nearly 70% of them want to quit, a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report has discovered.
However, while seven out of 10 would like to quit the habit, the CDC study shows that only half have attempted to do so and just 6% of them managed to succeed, according to a November 11 article by Reuters reporter Julie Steenhuysen.
Translating those statistics into real numbers, Steenhuysen reports that means approximately 45.3 million adults in the U.S. continue to light up on a regular basis. Doctors have advised 48.3% of those individuals to quit, the CDC claims, and while smoking rates have fallen, officials at the health agency are said to be concerned that the rate of decline has begun to slow down.
“We have seen over the past five years a flattening of the downward trend in youth initiation. We are very worried that there are a number of things that have been happening in terms of tobacco industry marketing techniques that affect youth,” Dr. Tim McAfee, director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the CDC, told reporters during a Thursday press conference, according to Steven Reinberg of USA Today’s HealthDay.
In spite of that, however, McAfee called the results of the study “reassuring,” admitting that the group had been concerned that many smokers would not be interested in quitting, regardless of the health risk. “In fact, what this study shows is quite the opposite,” he said. “There has been a decline in the last five years in the rate of smoking, and smokers are actually smoking less.”
The CDC report also discovered that only 32% of those who attempted to quit used smoking cessation aids, including patches or similar products; only 3.2% of those with just a high-school education were successful in their attempts to quit while 11.4% of college graduates were able to stop smoking; and that African-Americans were the demographic that was most interested in attempting to quit, as well as the least likely to use anti-smoking aids and the least likely to succeed.
“The CDC study also found that having health insurance was a big factor in a person’s ability to successfully quit smoking, as it meant they were more likely to be counseled by a doctor and to get reimbursed for nicotine patches or other aids,” Steenhuysen said. “According to the study, the uninsured had the lowest success rate of just 3.6 percent, while those with private insurance had a higher rate of 7.8 percent and people with military insurance had a success rate of over 9 percent.”
The research, which was published in the November 11 issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), was completed as part of the American Cancer Society-sponsored Great American Smokeout, which will take place on November 17, Reinberg said.
—
On the Net:
Comments