BACKGROUND
Smoking is still the leading cause of preventable death. Governments and healthcare providers should make available more and accessible resources to help tobacco users stop.
OBJECTIVE
This study describes a pilot longitudinal study that evaluated the efficacy of a computerized intervention compared to the brief intervention for smoking cessation among Brazilians.
METHODS
Smokers were recruited and randomly assigned to one of the two intervention groups.
RESULTS
The results showed similar rates of cessation and reduction for both intervention groups. The internet-based intervention was a little more effective for smoking cessation, while the brief intervention was more effective in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked per day. Despite this, this difference was small and had no statistical significance even after adjusting for intention-to-treat analysis. These results should be interpreted with caution, especially due to the small sample size.
CONCLUSIONS
Forty-nine smokers were enrolled in this study (25 in the brief intervention group; 24 in the internet-based intervention group). The mean age was 44.46 years old; most were male (59.2%), had elementary school (44.9%), smoked an average of 14.5 cigarettes per day, had a mean score of 4.65 for nicotine dependence, and score of 5.7 for motivation to quit. Measures were drawn from comparing cessation rate, motivation score and sought treatment between groups. Thirty-five participants answered the follow up 1 and 19 answered to the second.