Texting for health education
Mené en Suède auprès de 1 590 étudiants fumeurs (nombre médian de cigarettes fumées par semaine : 63 ou 70 selon le groupe), cet essai randomisé évalue, du point de vue de l'abstinence tabagique auto-rapportée (pas plus de 5 cigarettes fumées au cours des 8 dernières semaines), l'efficacité d'une intervention d'aide au sevrage tabagique par SMS
When I want my 13-year-old son to do something, I do not go to his room (“Get away, Dad”) or email him (so yesterday!) or call him (he will not answer). Instead, I text him. His usual answer is “k,” but it gets the job done. Therefore, I was not surprised that texting young adults was an effective smoking cessation technique. Specifically, in this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Müssener et al1 report that 8-week prolonged abstinence was almost twice as high among those randomized to receive specially tailored smoking cessation texts compared with those in the control group (25.9% vs 14.6%).
Of course, this is just one study and, unfortunately, biochemical confirmation of tobacco cessation was not possible. Still, if we are to make progress in health education, our techniques must keep up with how people wish to receive their information. Smart phones are almost ubiquitous, even among relatively low-income populations, and interventions using texts are likely to be much less costly than interventions involving face-to-face interactions. We need to figure out how to harness the power of smart phones—and not just for getting our children to throw out the garbage.
JAMA Internal Medicine , éditorial, 2015