Since women who smoke have double the chance of developing
cervical cancer compared to nonsmokers, persuading them to quit can have
a significant impact on their health, say Sue Hall, Ph.D., and her colleagues
from Guy’s, King’s & St. Thomas School of Medicine in
London.
Their study appears in the December issue of Nicotine & Tobacco
Research.
The researchers divided 172 women smokers into three groups.
A control group received no special information. A second group received
a leaflet pointing out the dangers of cervical cancer and the added risk
caused by smoking cigarettes. It also emphasized the benefits of quitting
smoking and the medical services available to help people quit.
The third group received a longer leaflet, which included
the same information but added a more detailed explanation of the biology
connecting smoking and cervical cancer. This leaflet explained how chemicals
from cigarettes travel in the bloodstream to the cervix and how smoking
damages the immune system.
Both leaflets said that if women stopped smoking, their
immune systems and cervixes would have a chance to recover, reducing
their chances of developing cancer.
The shorter leaflet increased the women’s readiness
to stop smoking, says Hall. About 75 percent of the women who got the
shorter leaflets said they were planning to stop smoking within six months,
compared to 46 percent of those getting the longer leaflet and 40 percent
of those who didn’t receive either one. (The difference between
the latter two groups was not significant, Hall says.)
“The greater effectiveness of the shorter leaflet
may be partly due to it being briefer and therefore quicker to read and
more easily understood,” she says. “It may not be necessary
to provide women with a detailed explanation of how smoking adversely
affects the cervix.”
The leaflets did not change the women’s views that
cervical cancer is a serious illness, because they already understood
that.
“It may not be necessary, or indeed desirable, to
attempt to increase [that perception] further,” Hall says. Health
messages might better emphasize increased awareness of smokers’ vulnerability
to cervical cancer and what they can do about it, she says.
Previous researchers have shown that motivating people
to change their actions requires more than providing an explanation linking
a behavior like smoking with a threat to their health. Effective messages
call for pointing out both a danger (like cervical cancer) and useful
steps to reduce vulnerability (like quitting smoking).
