Doctors can double the likelihood of patients quitting smoking by briefly discussing their tobacco use and encouraging them to quit, according to British researchers.

The Health Behavior News Service reported April 29 that a review of 41 previously published studies found that doctors can make a modest but important contribution to getting patients to quit smoking.

"Assuming an unassisted quit rate of 2 to 3 percent, a brief advice intervention can increase quitting by a further 1 to 3 percent," according to the study led by Lindsay Stead of the University of Oxford in England. No difference in effectiveness was seen between minimal and more intensive interventions.

"Cessation interventions are typically highly cost-effective, so even a very small improvement in effect from intensifying the intervention could well be cost-effective," Stead said.

"To a non-clinician, these results may seem underwhelming, but [they] are really quite significant when you consider how many people who smoke see a physician every year — about 80 percent — and how many more of them would quit if all doctors advised them to do so at every visit," said Abigail Halperin, M.D., a tobacco-related diseases specialist at the University of Washington.

The review appears in The Cochrane Library.