Cash incentives help smokers to kick the butt

Philadelphia, February 12: A new study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine found that smokers who were paid to stop smoking did well as compared to people those who got no cash reward.

The study author, Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the Center for Health Incentives at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton School in Philadelphia, United States, said, "These types of incentives can be very effective in increasing long term [smoking] cessation rates."

The researchers found that people were three times more likely to quit smoking within 24 weeks when they were paid up to $750. For study, almost 900 workers from General Electric (GE) were recruited across 85 different facilities in the United States. About 50 percent of the subjects were given the financial incentive, while the rest were merely encouraged to join quit-smoking programmes.

Dr. Kevin Volpp said that various past studies have shown that cash incentives did not work, but those tests had been smaller and the rewards had been as little as $10.

In the GE study, participants were rewarded as per incremental milestones as $100 for completing a smoking-cessation class, another $250 for quitting within the six months of joining study and $400 more for being smoke-free after twelve months.

They found that workers who were given incentives to stop smoking were much more likely to give up the habit than colleagues who only received information. 14.7 percent of the participants in the incentive group said they quit smoking within the first year of the study as compared to the 5 percent in the group that only received information.

"The [financial] incentive group had significantly higher rates of smoking cessation than did the information-only group nine or 12 months after enrollment," the researchers say.

From the final interview of their 18 months’ study, researchers found that 9.4 percent of the monetary reward group was still not smoking as compared to 3.6 percent of those who got no money.

GE plans to launch a similar scheme in 2010 for all American workers, trusting it will be cost effective in the long term.

Cigarette smoking is a major cause of heart attack, stroke and peripheral arterial disease. Nearly 40 percent of all people who die from smoking have had suffered a heart attack, stroke or blood vessel (cardiovascular) disease.

Tobacco use accounts for a large proportion of heart attacks among younger cigarette smokers. Every year approximately 438,000 people die in the United States alone due to tobacco.

Another recent and quite unusual study found that smokers, who refuse to stop smoking despite its health hazards, might be motivated to kick the butt in order to protect their pets from second hand smoke.