Sudden Decisions Make Many Women Quit Smoking

Scientists conducting a new scientific study on people who quit smoking determined that women are very likely to renounce their habit even in the absence of a premeditated plan. This behavior is displayed when they hear about measures designed to discourage smoking at home and the workplace.

Even though they may have not had any plan of quitting before they heard about the measures, women were likely to be caught in the heat of the moment and abandon smoking spontaneously. This discovery hints at new directions in the development of public healthcare policies.

Interestingly, the study also determined that numerous people attempt to quit when they hear about the measures to discourage smoking in the workplace or at home. Not all who try succeed, but the main thing is that they give it their best, in greater numbers than at any other time.

The team that conducted the new study refers to this difference in attitude as a “spur-of-the-moment” factor, and say that future public policies could be developed in such a manner so as to take advantage of a previously-unknown variable.

Data used in this research were collected from a national survey conducted in the United States, which focused on the cases of 7,610 women. All participants had jobs at a regular workplace (not at home), and 81 percent revealed that they smoked daily before the study started.

When the test subjects were subjected to home and work smoking bans, about 20 percent of those affected said that they would try to quit smoking. Only 14 percent of those with no bans in place pledged to do the same thing.

What amazed the research team was that even some of the women who had not expressed their desire to quit when asked decided to do so after they were exposed to the bans. Furthermore, the team found that a home smoking ban was the most effective trigger for this reaction.

“This is good news because smoke-free policies in the home may have an effect on increasing quit attempts regardless of motivation to quit,” explains the lead author of the new investigation, expert Allison Rose, MHS.

She holds an appointment as a federal contractor with the Clinical Monitoring Research Program at SAIC-Frederick, Inc., in Maryland. She is funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS).

Details of her work were published in the September-October issue of the esteemed American Journal of Health Promotion, PsychCentral reports.

“Yet, less than one-third of our population of working women smokers reported that they work and live in smoke-free environments. This suggests we have a lot more work to do to make sure that all women have full protection from secondhand smoke at both work and home,” Rose concludes.