States could see substantial savings with tobacco control programs

States could see substantial savings with tobacco control programs

From the Eureka News Alert, Mon Nov 28, 2011 00:00

(San Francisco State University) States that have shifted funds away from tobacco control programs may be missing out on millions of dollars of savings in the form of medical costs, Medicaid payments and lost productivity by workers. Results of a cost-benefit analysis, published in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy, show that if tobacco control programs are funded at the levels recommended by the CDC, states could save 14-20 times more than the cost of implementing the programs.

Related articles

• Call to enforce tobacco control ord (nation.com.pk)
• case study: tobacco control in South Africa (gph2110.wordpress.com)
• Tobacco Control In South Africa (gph2110.wordpress.com)
• Taxes and Tobacco Control in South Africa (gph2110.wordpress.com)
• Tobacco Use Prevention and Global Health Effectiveness (gph2110.wordpress.com)
• CDC: States with Strong Tobacco Control Programs More Likely to Reduce Smoking Rate (ibtimes.com)
• Smoking Down Over Five-Year Period (prweb.com)
• The economic benefits of tobacco control rapidly outweigh tobacco tax revenues (gizmag.com)

Odds of Quitting Smoking May Be Clear on Scans

Odds of Quitting Smoking May Be Clear on Scans

Activity in front part of brain can predict behavior, researchers say

From the January 31, 2011 Health Day news item by Robert Preidt

MONDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News) — Brain scans can predict a smoker’s chances of being able to quit, according to a new study.

It included 28 heavy smokers recruited from a smoking cessation program. Functional MRI was used to monitor the participants’ brain activity as they watched television ads meant to help people quit smoking.

The researchers contacted the participants one month later and found that they were smoking an average of five cigarettes a day, compared with an average of 21 a day at the start of the study.

But there was considerable variation in how successful individual participants were in reducing their smoking. The researchers found that a reaction in an area of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, while watching the quit-smoking ads was linked to reductions in smoking during the month after the brain scan.

Previous research by the same team suggested that activity in the prefrontal cortex is predictive of behavior change.

In the new study, published in the current issue of Health Psychology,** “we targeted smokers who were already taking action to quit, and we found that neural activity can predict behavior change, above and beyond people’s own assessment of how likely they are to succeed,” study author Emily Falk, director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and Department of Communication Studies, said in a university news release.

“These results bring us one step closer to the ability to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to select the messages that are most likely to affect behavior change both at the individual and population levels,” Falk said. “It seems that our brain activity may provide information that introspection does not.”

SOURCE: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, news release, Jan. 31, 2011

** For suggestions on how to get this article for free or at low cost, click here

 

 

FDA Tobbaco Products : Information Resources

FDA Tobacco Products provides information resources on tobacco products for consumers and healthcare professionals.

Resources include

• News and Events (updates, press releases, meetings,etc)
• Guidance, Compliance & Regulatory Information with links on legal, regulatory, and policy issues related to tobacco products.
• Protecting Kids from Tobacco with information on related regulations
• Resources for you with links to information on how to quit, tobacco prevention in youth, and information for health care providers

The Tools and Alerts section on the home page includes options for email alerts and Twitter. Contact information by phone and fax is also provided.

When the state paid, people stopped smoking

From the December 7, 2010 Reuters health news item by Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When Massachusetts started paying for stop-smoking treatments, people not only kicked the habit but also had fewer heart attacks, researchers reported on Tuesday in the first study to show a clear payoff from investing in smoking prevention efforts.

Smoking dropped by 10 percent among clients of Medicaid, the state health insurance plan for the poor, and nearly 40 percent of Medicaid patients who smoked used benefits to get nicotine patches or drugs to help them quit, the researchers said….

…Thomas Land and colleagues at the Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program, as well as the Harvard Medical School, looked at hospital records for the study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000375.