Professors Invented a New Smoking Treatment

Published on March 12, 2010 10:05 AM

Anti-smoking cessation programs have more effects among Latino smokers because it is for them culturally appropriate, according to Belinda Borrelli, professor of psychiatry and human behavior.

As a lot of studies showed, smokers with asthma have worse asthma control, more airway damage and faster loss of lung function. Smoking is harmful for smokers with asthma but also for asthmatic children, because it causes the airways to become swollen, narrow, and filled with sticky mucus — the same problems that cause breathing trouble in people with asthma.

For example asthma is very widespread among Latino children. Latinos — the largest minority group in the United States — have obtained less education about smoking, and also parents of asthmatic children smoke as much as the other Latino population.

Smoking cigarettes have double impact because it has a harmful result on both, parent smoking and child asthma, said Borrelli.

The study researchers gave about half of the participants a culturally adapted smoking cessation treatment. This investigation took an approach consistent with Latino merits and focused on the family. For this group, researchers placed nicotine advisers on asthmatic children of Latino caregivers and in their homes for to measure smoke levels. Only after a week, caregivers were told about the negative effects of the smoking.

Caregivers also received more knowledge on the effects of secondhand smoke on asthma, and how kicking the bad habit could lessen these dangers.

But the other half received a treatment that was not particularly accommodated and succeeds clinical help for smoking cessation. These participants did not receive nicotine supervises.
"Latinos replied and quit smoking more with a culturally adapted intervention," Borrelli added.

At the end of investigation was found that after three months, 28.2 percent of caregivers that received special cure had absolutely stopped smoking, in comparison with 17.7 percent of caregivers who had received the standard treatment.

Researchers concluded that being a smoker is an evident risk, but just being everywhere people who smoke. And also parents can help kids and teens with asthma by protecting them from the effects of tobacco smoke.