Multilingual Telephone Quitline Effective for Asian Smokers

Telephone counseling services (also known as quitlines) are an effective intervention for Chinese-, Korean-, and Vietnamese-speaking smokers living in the U.S., and should be incorporated into current smoking cessation services, according to a study published Jan. 25 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Quitlines have played an essential role in helping people quit smoking in the U.S. These services, however, had never been tested with Asian immigrants who may have limited proficiency in English. Dr. Shu-Hong Zhu, a Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and his colleagues designed an intervention to test the effectiveness of quitline counseling for Asian immigrant smokers.

The study was embedded into the California quitline service operated by UCSD. Dr. Zhu and his team developed a culturally tailored counseling protocol and tested its effectiveness in Chinese-, Korean-, and Vietnamese-speaking smokers in a large randomized trial. Participants were 2,277 adult smokers who were first time callers to the Asian-language lines of the California Smokers' …