United States: A new Cochrane review, co-led by a UMass Amherst researcher, shows that financial incentives are highly effective in helping people quit smoking. For the first time, the study provides strong evidence that this method also works for pregnant individuals, offering a promising new approach to smoking cessation.
Another systematic review also published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews has provided moderate level of evidence that financial reward had an impact on pregnant woman to stop smoking.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, ‘When we came to reproduce this review, we identified further studies reporting on these types of financial incentives in pregnant people and, this time, we found high-certainty evidence that they do effectively help pregnant people quit smoking and remain smoke-free,’ explained the study’s senior author, Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, an assistant professor of health policy and promotion with the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.

“We also understand that smoking during pregnancy is very dangerous to the parent and the fetus,” Hartmann-Boyce adds. And people are much more conservative in pregnancy in terms of relying on many of the pharmacological treatments that are available for smoking cessation.
That is why the strategies described are directed toward identifying ways in which we can support pregnant people to stop smoking.
In the latest review the finding comprised of 47 mixed population studies that are community based and conducted across the United States, Europe, southeast Asia, Hong Kong and south Africa of which 14 were new to this review comprising participants of nearly 22000.
The researchers once more identified “high-certainty evidence” of how financial incentives increase smoking cessation rates over the long term even when financial rewards are no longer offered to patients.

In the second study, the authors considered thirteen trials from the U.S., the U.K., and France enrolling significantly pregnant persons, 3,942 in total.
We found that for every 100 patients enrolled during pregnancy and given financial incentives, 13 patients were likely to quit smoking at 6 months or longer post-enrollment as opposed to 6 patients out of 100 non-financial incentive patients.
Unfortunately, due to insufficient evidence we were unable to determine if offering different types of value led to smoking cessation rates says the paper.