MedWire News: Telling smokers their lung age significantly improves the likelihood of them quitting, according to UK researchers.
The study "strongly supports the policy of giving patients their spirometry results expressed as 'lung age' along with advice about the dangers of continuing to smoke and methods of quitting," Gary Parkes (The Limes Surgery, Hoddesdon) and colleagues write in the British Medical Journal.
Lung age - the age of the average person who has an FEV1 equal to the individual - was developed as a way of making spirometry data easier to understand and as a psychologic tool to show smokers the apparent premature ageing of their lungs.
Parkes and colleagues investigated whether telling 280 smokers their estimated spirometric lung age increased their likelihood of quitting compared with 281 controls who were supplied with raw FEV1 data. Both groups were advised to quit and offered referral to local National Health Service (NHS) smoking cessation services.
After 12 months, the authors found that 13.6% of smokers who were told their lung age had quit, compared with 6.4% in the control group. The team estimated the cost per successful quitter at £280 (€366, $556).
"Our cost estimates, which assume that spirometry is carried out in UK general practice, suggest that estimation and communication of lung age is of comparable effectiveness to, and potentially cheaper than, other currently available treatments on the NHS, including nicotine replacement therapy, bupropion, face-to-face counseling, and telephone counseling," the authors write.
They conclude: "Given the heavy health and economic burden of smoking, we believe that formal economic evaluation of this new and simple intervention should be a research priority."
Free full text
