Abstract
Smoking cessation is associated with substantial health benefits. Nevertheless outcome of smoking cessation was often investigated on strongly selected populations. We aimed to assess the influence of our smoking cessation programme on lung function under real life conditions.
703 smoking employees from University Hospital Basel, Switzerland, and two local health industry companies (Novartis Pharma AG, F.Hoffmann- La Roche AG) participated on a structured smoking cessation programm. The programm consisted of 10 visits with counselling and motivational support within 2 years of follow-up. Various modalities of both nicotine replacement therapy and/or bupropion could be offered. The impact of several factors on FEV1 was analyzed by a linear mixed effect model (fixed effects with 95% confidence intervalls are shown in parentheses)
Results: Successful smoking cessation at 24 months was associated with an increase of FEV1 of 2.75% (95% CI [0.64;0.76] p= 0.045). Improvement in lung func-tion was observed independently from age (-0.01 95% CI [-0.20;0.01] p=0.067) and gender (1.84 95% CI [-0.22; 3.91] p= 0.08). Changes in FEV1 varied between study centres (6.55 95% CI [3.22; 9.88] p< 0.001). Participants with higher FEV1 values at baseline showed a greater improvement of lung function after 2 years (0.70 95% CI [0.64; 0.76] p< 0.001). FEV1 values of successful quitters were additionally influenced by choosen pharmacological support.
The outcome of a smoking cessation attempt as well as baseline lung function and medication significantly influenced FEV1 within 2 years of a quit attempt. These observations could be important in encouraging smokers to stop smoking.
- © 2011 ERS
