Association between the First Smoking Cessation Treatment and Continuous Abstinence for up to 3 Years:

<p>Objectives: We aimed to examine the association between initial smoking cessation treatment and abstinence using databases of medical insurance and annual health checkup.<br>Methods: We conducted a retrospective explanatory analysis of data from a Japanese medical claims database, which included information from private insurers from April 2005 to December 2019. During the period when the response to the question on habitual smoking in annual health checkups changed from “yes” to “no”, the patients were divided into two groups: those who received smoking cessation treatment and those who did not received smoking cessation treatment. We compared the proportion of individuals maintaining smoking abstinence at annual health checkups between the two groups retrospectively.<br>Results: We included 7,766 participants with complete health checkup data for 3 years in the primary analysis, with 505 and 7,261 participants in the treatment and non-treatment groups, respectively. Individuals in the treatment group were 8%–9% more likely to abstain from smoking for 1, 2, and 3 years from the quitting index date; the risk ratio remained significant from the first to the third year.<br>Conclusions: These results suggest that the group that received smoking cessation treatment was expected to maintain smoking cessation in the long term compared to the group that achieved smoking cessation without treatment.</p>