More ideas on quitting smoking from the researchers on the Cochrane team. How about a hospital stay?

Since hospitals are smoke-free, any smoker has to stop smoking while in the hospital, whether for a tobacco-related disease or not.

The researchers found that smokers in the hospital are particularly open to information about quitting smoking. However, only intensive interventions with at least 30 minutes a day of counselling and at least one month of supportive care after the stay show any benefit. They found that adding nicotine replacement therapy or bupropion to the plans had some additional effect, although it was not statistically significant.

Maybe we should try to offer some sort of inpatient stays to smokers who want to quit, even if they are not sick right now?

The main goal of programs aimed at smokers has been to help them stop smoking completely. There has been little attention to helping them reduce their use. However, some people are willing to try to reduce the number of cigarettes they smoke while they are unwilling to quit completely.

A team of Cochrane Researchers analyzed the current studies available to see if there were any effective methods that could reduce use.

The team found that between 6% and 9% of people using nicotine replacement products managed to reduce their use of cigarettes, which was certainly better than the control groups where only 1-3% reduced their use. The team also found no evidence that the treatments that aimed to reduce use diverted people from stopping completely.

However, the researchers point out that there is no evidence that reducing the number of cigarettes used has any health benefits, other than leading people to one day quit smoking entirely.

I can read this analysis two ways. One way tells me that reducing the number of cigarettes is not an unreasonable path to completely quitting smoking one day. That's promising. The other way seems to say that reducing the number of cigarettes doesn't improve health anyway, so you might as well smoke more? I'll go with the first. Less cigarettes has to be better than more.

A new study shows that younger smokers trying to quit are less likely than older smokers to use tools such as patches to medications to help them, a new study out of the University of Illinois at Chicago shows.

Dr. Susan J. Curry and her team analyzed data from over 6,500 smokers from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey. Over 30 percent of smokers 25 and older had tried medication compared to only 18 percent of younger smokers. According to Curry, current smoking cessation and prevention program focus either on older people with smoking-related illness or younger people who haven't yet started to smoke.

Curry says that more research is needed to find out how to reach younger smokers regarding the available treatment options for quitting smoking.