Mindfulness training app effect on a cigarette smoking quit attempt: Investigator-blinded 58-county RCT
Mené en Californie sur 213 fumeurs souhaitant arrêter de fumer (âge moyen : 41,2 ans), cet essai randomisé évalue l'effet, sur la consommation tabagique, d'une application d'entraînement à la pleine conscience par la méditation
Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable cancers. A majority of the 34 million people who currently smoke report wanting to quit. Mindfulness training (MT) apps offer a guided telehealth intervention to foster individual's behavioral practice of meditation. We present the main outcomes of a parallel-group RCT that tested app-MT versus attention control on smoking behavior.We enrolled adult residents from across California who smoked daily and were willing to make a quit attempt (N = 213). Participants completed daily sessions in 10-minute segments for 14 consecutive days. Participants then started a quit attempt and reported daily smoking for 28 days following the quit date using the timeline follow back measure.Seven-day point prevalence abstinence (PPA) for each week during the 4-week quit period ranged from 21.8-27.7% for App-MT and 17.9-19.6% for controls. The intention-to-treat sample revealed app-MT outperformed controls on proportion of abstinence days during the quit period (OR = 2.00, CI 1.03-3.87, p=.041). While 7-day PPA for week 4 favored App-MT, significance was not reached (OR = 1.65, CI 0.84-3.23, p=.148). The mean number of cigarettes smoked per day among smokers was 4.95 for app-MT versus 5.69 for controls (OR = 0.81, CI 0.71-0.92, p=.002) suggesting harm reduction in continued smokers.A MT app prescribed for two weeks leading up to a quit date showed advantage over controls for total abstinence days and fewer cigarettes smoked in a diverse sample encompassing urban and rural residents. These findings yield implications for the utilization of apps to reduce exposure to the carcinogenic properties of cigarette smoke.
JNCI Cancer Spectrum 2023