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American Legacy Foundation® Statement of Support for the U.S. Public Health Service 2008 Clinical Practice Guideline: Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence

5/7/2008

Statement by Cheryl G. Healton, Dr. P.H., president and CEO, The American Legacy Foundation

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Today the U.S. Public Health Service released its 2008 Clinical Practice Guideline: Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence. The American Legacy Foundation^® strongly supports these recommendations in the effort to help the 45 million Americans who smoke to quit.

Legacy’s mission is to build a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit. The important findings of the 2008 Clinical Practice Guideline promote our mission by ensuring that clinicians and health systems have the tools necessary to help all smokers to quit.

The PHS Clinical Guideline have historically been landmark reports, helping to guide best practices for our nation’s health. We are particularly pleased to see within the guidelines, encouragement for intervention and follow-up with all tobacco users who visit doctors.

The Guideline also provides solid scientific evidence to bolster the recommendations of the 2007 Institutes of Medicine report related to developing a comprehensive system of continuity of care for all tobacco users, especially the underserved and uninsured. Nearly 70 percent of American smokers want to quit, but few actually use the most effective treatments that can help them do so successfully. Physicians are among the most important sources of health information and have the potential to make a major contribution to further reducing tobacco use.

Given the importance of tobacco-use prevention for youth, we are pleased to see the 2008 Guideline Update’s recommendations for adolescents, specifically:

• Clinicians should ask pediatric and adolescent patients about tobacco use and provide a strong message regarding the importance of totally abstaining from tobacco use.
• Counseling has been shown effective in treatment of adolescent smokers. Therefore, adolescent smokers should be provided with counseling interventions to aid them in quitting smoking.

The Guideline Update’s ten key recommendations are vital. Particularly salient to our efforts are:

• Tobacco dependence is a chronic disease that often requires repeated intervention and multiple attempts to quit. However, effective treatments exist that can significantly increase rates of long-term abstinence.
• Tobacco-dependence treatments are effective across a broad range of populations. Every patient willing to make a quit attempt should be offered the counseling and medications identified as effective.

We note that progress in reducing adult smoking rates has been made in recent years. Since the first guideline was published in 1996, smoking prevalence among U.S. adults has declined from about 25 percent to about 21 percent. This Guideline Update provides an opportunity to build on that progress.

However, smoking remains the country's leading preventable cause of death. The most recent smoking prevalence data from the CDC demonstrates a dangerous plateau in smoking rates for 2006, having stalled for a second year in a row, after a 7-year smoking decline.

For more information on how you can quit, go to www.BecomeAnEx.org. EX^® is a new way of approaching quitting, helping smokers re-learn their lives without cigarettes by identifying the individual triggers that make them want to smoke.

The American Legacy Foundation^® is dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit. Located in Washington, D.C., the foundation develops programs that address the health effects of tobacco use, especially among vulnerable populations disproportionately affected by the toll of tobacco, through grants, technical assistance and training, partnerships, youth activism, and counter-marketing and grassroots marketing campaigns. The foundation’s programs include truth^®, a national youth smoking prevention campaign that has been cited as contributing to significant declines in youth smoking; EX^®, an innovative public health program designed to speak to smokers in their own language and change the way they approach quitting; research initiatives exploring the causes, consequences and approaches to reducing tobacco use; and a nationally-renowned program of outreach to priority populations. The American Legacy Foundation was created as a result of the November 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) reached between attorneys general from 46 states, five U.S. territories and the tobacco industry. Visit www.americanlegacy.org.