Dental office interventions are essential for smoking cessation

Abstract

Cigarette smoking has a major impact both on oral health and general systemic health. Because up to 70 percent of smokers see their dentists each year, the dentist is in a very powerful position to intervene with the smokers to help them stop smoking. I have suggested a four-step program for assisting patients to quit, based on the National Cancer Institute's suggested protocol for the dental office, which uses techniques shown in clinical trials to be effective for helping smokers quit. The core of the NCI program involves identifying smokers, advising them to quit, providing assistance to patients trying to quit, and following-up on patients as a means of enhancing success rates. Dentists who implement an effective smoking cessation program in their practices can expect to achieve quit rates up to 10 to 15 percent each year among their patients who smoke. Such a rate of success, if established nationwide and continued over a period of years, would markedly reduce the prevalence of smoking in the United States.