A new initiative brought providers across the state together on a common mission: address the high smoking rates they were seeing in their patients before wheeling them into the operating room.
Smoking is linked to many serious health issues, yet a recent study found almost a quarter of people undergoing common surgeries report smoking cigarettes.
Over the last few years, providers of nearly 14,000 patients undergoing vascular surgery in Michigan brought three components into exam rooms: physician counseling, nicotine replacement therapy, and referral to the Michigan Tobacco Quitline
Image credit: Michigan Medicine
“This study evaluated a smoking cessation initiative that the Michigan Cardiovascular Consortium (BMC2) started in 2018 to help patients quit smoking after undergoing vascular surgery,” explained senior author Peter Henke, M.D., a professor of surgery and the interim section chief of vascular surgery at the University of Michigan Health Frankel Cardiovascular Center.
The new study, published in the Journal of Vascular Surgery, found that more than a third of patients had ditched cigarettes a month after their vascular surgery procedure, and 43% had quit a year after their surgery – a striking improvement to the average annual quit rates of below 10%, the authors said.
“These results tell us that patients can achieve impressive quit rates after surgery, that delivering smoking cessation interventions at a large scale is feasible, and that they are effective in helping patients quit in the short-term,” said lead author Ryan Howard, M.D., a U-M general surgery resident.
However, Howard noted that the higher quit rate observed 30 days after surgery wasn’t maintained after a year. “Clearly future efforts will need to focus on long-term effectiveness as well,” he added.
Source: University of Michigan Health System