Helping Those With Mental Illness Quit Smoking

Summary

This study tests whether pre-cessation interventions known to be effective in the general population will increase acceptance of evidence-based treatment, engagement and compliance with that treatment and initial quitting success. One hundred and seventy two patients will be recruited from 13 Community Support Programs (CSPs). CSPs provide community based care to those diagnosed with persistent and serious mental illness. All participants will receive two group sessions (40 minutes each) modeled after "Kicking Butts", a group-based quitting preparation program used for the past four years in two Milwaukee CSP programs run by Wisconsin Community Services. Individuals will then be randomly assigned to the experimental and control conditions (n=86 each). Experimental subjects will receive four evidence-based preparatory interventions (motivational interviewing, smoking reduction, practice quit attempt, and pre-quit use of nicotine replacement medication) (25 - 30 minutes each). Attention control subjects will also receive four individual sessions of the same duration. However their individual sessions' content will be a discussion of the personal relevance of the group material and will not include any of the preparatory interventions. Data will be collected via brief surveys taken pre-intervention, at the end of the last individual session, and three months later and from a database provided by the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line (WTQL).

Conditions

• Smoking
• Nicotine Dependence
• Mental Disorders

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Cognitive / Motivational Individual Sessions

Cognitive Motivational subjects will receive four evidence-based preparatory interventions (motivational interviewing, smoking reduction, practice quit attempt, and pre-quit use of nicotine replacement medication) (25 - 30 minutes each).

BEHAVIORAL

Attention Control Individual Sessions

Attention control subjects will receive four placebo individual sessions (25-30 minutes each). The session content will reemphasize group discussion of the personal health risks from smoking.

DRUG

Nicotine Patch

Cognitive Motivational subjects will be asked to take one 21 mg patch/day for 4 weeks.

BEHAVIORAL

Group Curriculum

Everyone to be put into the experimental or active comparator group will attend 2 group meetings over two weeks each of which lasts 40 minutes. Experience with the Kicking Butts program indicates that this duration is well tolerated by this population. The content of these two group meetings is based on the Kicking Butts program. The Kicking Butts program was initially developed as a cessation intervention, but consistent with the literature about the need to prepare this population to make a quit attempt, has evolved to emphasize preparation for quitting. Topics addressed include the health consequences of smoking, reasons to quit and methods of quitting.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Wisconsin, Madison

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Bruce Christiansen, PhD · University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

99 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2012-12-31

Primary Completion

2014-06-30

Completion

2014-06-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations