A Scoping Review of Interventions for Tobacco Cessation Among African American Individuals

Abstract

Purpose of review: African American individuals in the US have the highest rates of mortality from diseases such as lung cancer, coronary heart disease, and stroke compared with other minoritized people due to tobacco smoking. Evidence-based interventions are useful for reducing the burden of diseases by helping those who smoke to quit. Despite a higher motivation to quit, African American adult smokers have lower success rates and less access to evidence-based interventions. Hence, it is important to study the factors associated with unsuccessful quit attempts among this population and to search the literature for gaps that need to be addressed.

Recent findings: We identified 19 articles that focused on Quitlines and text messaging interventions to help African Americans to quit. The interventions used in the studies were Quitlines, text messaging, telephone counseling and media campaigns. We found that African Americans were more likely to use Quitlines than Whites. Studies indicated that interventions should be tailored according to patient preferences. For example, one of the findings was that participants had mixed feelings about the use of standard and non-standard Quitline services. Individuals aged over 60 years preferred standard services such as telephone counseling and printed materials. However, the younger generation were interested in non-standard services.

Summary: There are only a few studies focused on the use of Quitlines and the utilization of their text messaging service among African Americans. Future studies should focus on the reasons disparities in smoking cessation rates exist among African American individuals and leverage the use of text messaging.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40429-025-00660-9.

Keywords: African Americans; Quitlines; Smoking cessation; Text messaging.

Fig. 1

PRISMA flow diagram