Author: Mark Mascolini
09 February 2010
Women with HIV or at risk of HIV in the US Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) stopped smoking less over 10 years of follow-up than women in the general population. Current or former use of illegal drugs made stopping less likely.
Throughout the United States, annual smoking cessation rates have ranged from 3.4% to 8.5% over several years. To determine how often women with HIV stop smoking, WIHS researchers studied 537 women with HIV and 210 without HIV who smoked when they enrolled in the cohort in 1994 and 1995.
WIHS has large proportions of African-African and Hispanic women—61% and 22% of this study group. Two thirds of the women report annual incomes below $12,000. HIV-negative women in WIHS are judged to have a high risk of HIV infection.
WIHS investigators defined smoking cessation as quitting continuously for more than 12 months after 10 years of follow-up. By that measure, 121 women (16%) quit to yield an annual sustained cessation rate of 1.8%, well below the rate in the general population (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.6 to 2.1). WIHS women with and without HIV did not differ in how often they stopped smoking.
Multivariate statistical analysis determined that women with more education were more likely to quit smoking (P = 0.02). Compared with black women, Hispanics were almost twice as likely to quit (odds ratio 1.87, 95% CI 1.4 to 2.9).
Current illicit drug users were about 60% less likely to quit smoking than other women (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.24 to 0.74), and former drug users were 35% less likely to stop smoking (OR 0.65, 95% CI 0.49 to 0.86). Women who smoked more cigarettes daily were also significantly less likely to quit (P < 0.001).
“Given the high prevalence of smoking, the high risk of adverse health events from smoking, and low rates of cessation,” the WIHS investigators conclude, “it is imperative that we increase efforts and overcome barriers to help these women quit smoking.”
Source: David Goldberg, Kathleen M. Weber, Jennifer Orsi, Nancy A. Hessol, Gypsyamber D’Souza, D. Heather Watts, Rebecca Schwartz, Chenglong Liu, Marshall Glesby, Pamela Burian, Mardge H. Cohen. Smoking cessation among women with and at risk for HIV: are they quitting? Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2010; 25: 39-44.
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