Article Text
Abstract
Background Few studies have examined interest in quitting smoking and factors associated with quitting in mainland China.
Objective To characterise interest in quitting, quitting behaviour, the use of cessation methods and reasons for thinking about quitting among adult urban smokers in six cities in China.
Methods Data is from Wave 1 of the ITC China Survey, a face-to-face household survey of 4732 adult smokers randomly selected from six cities in China in 2006. Households were sampled using a stratified multistage design.
Findings The majority of smokers had no plan to quit smoking (75.6%). Over half (52.7%) of respondents had ever tried to quit smoking. Few respondents thought that they could successfully quit smoking (26.5%). Smokers were aware of stop-smoking medications (73.5%) but few had used these medications (5.6%). Only 48.2% had received advice from a physician to quit smoking. The number one reason for thinking about quitting smoking in the last 6 months was concern for personal health (55.0%). Most smokers also believed that the government should do more to control smoking (75.2%).
Conclusion These findings demonstrate the need to: (1) increase awareness of the dangers of smoking; (2) provide cessation support for smokers; (3) have physicians encourage smokers to quit; (4) denormalise tobacco use so that smokers feel pressured to quit; (5) implement smoke-free laws to encourage quitting; (6) develop stronger warning labels about the specific dangers of smoking and provide resources for obtaining further cessation assistance; and (7) increase taxes and raise the price of cigarettes.
- China
- cessation
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Supplementary materials
Chinese Version 19/Suppl_2/i12
Files in this Data Supplement:
Footnotes
Funding Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canada (#79551), National Cancer Institute (NCI)/National Institute of Health (NIH R01 CA125116-01A1), Roswell Park Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (TTURC- P50 CA111236), funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, with additional support from a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Canada Graduate Scholarship Master's Award, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Doctoral Research Award, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategic Training Program in Tobacco Research.
Competing interests None.
Patient consent Obtained.
Ethics approval Ethics approval was obtained from the Office of Research at the University of Waterloo (Waterloo Canada), and the internal review boards at: Roswell Park Cancer Institute (Buffalo, USA), the Cancer Council Victoria (Victoria, Australia), and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention (Beijing, China).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.