Financial Incentives for Smoking Cessation Among Mothers

Smoking prevalence among disadvantaged mothers remains at strikingly high levels (40-60%). Disadvantaged women are more likely to begin smoking at an earlier age, be heavier smokers, be nicotine dependent, and fail in their efforts to quit smoking (Kandel et al., 2009). These women and their children also suffer higher rates of smoking-related adverse health consequences.

Despite widespread knowledge of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke exposure (SHSe), estimates are that 85% of children from low-income U.S. families experience chronic exposure. Children exposed to SHS are at increased risk for numerous serious health problems, including sudden infant death syndrome, more severe asthma, lower respiratory infections, and chronic middle ear disease, and maternal smoking is a particularly significant contributor to this increased morbidity and mortality. SHSe is also a substantial economic burden on the U.S. healthcare system, being estimated to increase direct medical and life-lost costs by > $5 billion annually.

Interventions developed to reduce children's SHSe have aimed to (1) decrease parental smoking around their children, (2) increase parental smoking cessation, or (3) both. Since smoking by a child's mother is a particularly significant contributor to SHSe, interventions have typically targeted smoking mothers. Regarding efforts to decrease smoking around children, studies testing relatively low-intensity interventions (e.g., written materials, brief advice) have failed to change exposure levels, while those testing more intensive interventions have had more success decreasing children's SHSe, with at least some instances of biochemically-verified changes.

Clearly, more effective smoking-cessation interventions for mothers are needed to meet the public health priority of reducing SHSe among children. The investigators recognize that maternal smoking cessation will not eliminate SHSe among children since many (~40%) live with more than one smoker. However, the evidence is clear that smoking mothers are the primary contributors to their children's SHSe, making them the obvious first target. The overarching goal of this project is to develop an efficacious, cost-effective incentive-based smoking cessation intervention that is combined with state-of-the-art smoking-cessation pharmacotherapy practices to optimize outcomes.

Participants will be 250 mothers (10 pilot and 80 per treatment condition) recruited from our university-affiliated hospital's pediatric practice, other pediatric and family medicine practices throughout the county in which our clinic is located, local offices for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and other recruitment strategies (e.g., ads on Facebook). Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: (1) usual care for smoking cessation and protecting children from SHSe, (2) usual care combined with incentives for objectively verified smoking abstinence, and (3) usual care combined with incentives and pharmacotherapy using innovative procedures to enhance its efficacy.

The investigators believe combining pharmacotherapies with incentives could be an effective strategy for surmounting adherence problems in this population by assuring that women have regular contact with clinic staff and thereby providing staff opportunities to problem-solve obstacles that may have arisen around adherence or side effects and to regularly underscore the importance and potential benefits of using the medications as prescribed.

The investigators hypothesize that each of the interventions with incentives will increase smoking abstinence compared to usual care alone, but that the largest magnitude and most cost-effective treatment effects will be achieved by combining incentives with pharmacotherapy. They also hypothesize that (a) both incentives interventions will decrease child cotinine levels significantly more than usual care alone and (b) that SHSe levels will be significantly lower among children of abstainers than smokers.

Taken together, developing efficacious and cost-effective interventions to increase smoking cessation interventions among disadvantaged mothers and reducing SHSe among their children is an important U.S. public health priority. The financial incentives model is effective with other treatment-recalcitrant populations and we believe has the potential to meet this important public-health challenge. Behavioral-economic theory suggests that the efficacy of the cessation intervention is at least in part attributable to providing smaller, more immediate incentives for success that act to bridge the temporal delay to the larger naturalistic rewards of improved health outcomes for mother and child. The investigators will continue to investigate the behavioral-economic processes involved in smoking among disadvantaged women and in individual differences in treatment response. Lastly, there is rapidly growing interest in the use of incentives to promote healthy behavior change in disadvantaged populations. The proposed project and others like it will be important to assuring that the necessary scientific knowledge is available to support that effort.