A review of 33 studies on smoking-cessation interventions found that smokers who are admitted as hospital inpatients tend to be receptive to stop-smoking counseling even if their illness was not smoking-related, Science Daily reported July 17.

Researchers focused on intensive interventions, which provided smokers with at least 30 minutes of counseling during their hospital stay plus follow-up phone calls for at least a month afterwards. They found that patients who received intensive interventions were 65 percent more likely to quit smoking by 6-12 months after discharge, while those who received less-intensive interventions were no more likely to quit than smokers who did not receive services.

Giving patients smoking-cessation medications like bupropion or nicotine-replacement products also appeared to be effective in getting smokers to quit.

"Smokers know that smoking is harmful to a person's health, but many of them don't really believe that smoking is harmful to their own health until they get sick," said lead author Nancy Rigotti, M.D., director of the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Kelly Kessler, vice president of program services for the American Lung Association of Maryland, said that the nonsmoking environment at hospitals plays a key role in getting smokers to quit. "For many smokers, life-changing events, such as illness or loss of a loved one, can be very influential in motivating them to make a quit attempt, [but] for others, the stress of an illness can also make it more difficult," she said. "The smoke-free environment is critical. When people can't smoke for several days, they begin to understand that they can live without cigarettes. Taking advantage of this jump-start helps them to stay quit after leaving the hospital."

"What motivates an individual to make a quit attempt can be greatly influenced by the advice of those seen as authority figures such as physicians and employers, making it critical that those key people are trained to provide help for patients or employees wanting to quit," Kessler added.

The research appears in the July 18, 2007 issue of The Cochrane Library.