Many adults around the world, who have become aware of the effects of tobacco over the years, and also have begun to experience the negative effects, are constantly trying to quit the habit. While some of them have succeeded through sheer will power, others find it very difficult, and may use some help from professionals, psychologists say. A new scientific study just recently proved that Web and computer-based interventions could be just as effective, if not even more so, than regular, face-to-face meetings between therapists or counselors and smokers.

The new investigation, which was published in the May 25th issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA/Archives publication, compiled data obtained between 1989 and 2008 by more than 22 other studies. “Smoking is the single greatest cause of preventable disease and premature death,” the authors of the research wrote in their paper's abstract. At the moment, they added, those who wanted to quit the habit could attend individual or group counseling, could talk to an expert on a telephone quit-line counseling, or could take medication or nicotine patches to aid the effort.

In charge of the research team was expert Seung-Kwon Myung, M.D., M.S., who is now working out of the National Cancer Center, in Goyang, South Korea. At the time of the study, he was based at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB). He said that the researches his team studied included some 29,549 participants, of which 16,050 were randomly assigned to a computer-based intervention program, while the other 13,499 were placed inside a control group. Ten of the studies themselves used a number of methods to aid the patients, including counseling, classroom lessons, nicotine replacement gum or patches, medication and “quitlines,” whereas the other 12 only employed Web-based programs.

“The stand-alone interventions had a significant effect on smoking cessation as well as on those that had supplemental interventions. However, compared with adults, these programs did not significantly increase the abstinence rate in adolescent populations. Our findings imply that there is sufficient evidence to support the use of a Web- or computer-based smoking cessation program for adult smokers. As global Web users continue to increase, Web-based smoking cessation programs could become a promising new strategy that is easily accessible for smokers worldwide,” the team added in the paper.

According to the results of the survey, when all data from the other researches were pooled and analyzed, the experts figured out the fact that those in Web- or computer-based intervention programs were more than 1.5 times (150 percent) more likely to quit than those in the control group. In the follow-up stage of the study, between six and ten months later, 11.7 percent of quitters from the study group stood away from tobacco, as opposed to only seven percent in the control group. The percentage proportion between the two batches of subjects was kept one year after the study as well (9.9 to 5.7).