STANWOOD — Members of the Stanwood High School class of 2005 participated in a landmark study by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center on smoking among high school students.
They were part of the “control group” for the research, and did not receive anti-smoking counseling.
The study was the largest trial of teen smoking cessation ever conducted, research center officials said. The findings were reported in the Oct. 12 online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The study demonstrated that it’s possible to recruit and retain a large number of teen smokers into a smoking intervention study and help them kick the habit through personalized telephone counseling sessions, a spokesman from the center’s Cancer Prevention Program said.
“This is the first youth smoking cessation trial to report statistically significant increases in six-month prolonged abstinence … among a large population of teen smokers in a nonmedical setting,” said Arthur Peterson, a member of the Hutchinson Center’s Public Health Sciences Division.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the trial involved more than 2,000 teenage smokers in the state from Stanwood and 49 other high schools.
Half of the schools were randomly assigned to the experimental intervention. Teens in these schools were invited during their senior year to take part in confidential, personalized phone counseling designed to help motivate them to quit smoking.
The remaining 25, including Stanwood, served as comparison schools. Teen smokers from these schools did not participate in the phone counseling. The study also included 745 nonsmokers to ensure that contacting students for participation in the trial would not reveal a participant’s smoking status.
As juniors, the class of 2005 participated in a baseline survey, and then were followed by mailed survey a year after graduation to learn about changes in their attitudes and smoking practices. The study showed that nearly 22 percent of all smokers in the counseling group had stayed away from smokes for six months, compared to the nearly 18 percent of those in the control group.
“We admiringly applaud, and thank, the administrators and staff of Stanwood High School and the class of 2005 and their parents, for their terrific interest and cooperation, which were so essential to the success of this pioneering study,” Peterson said.
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com.
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