Smoking Cessation for Low-Income Pregnant Women

To meet the Healthy People 2010 objective of increasing tobacco abstinence among pregnant women to 90%, new methods for treating nicotine addiction among pregnant women are needed. To this end, we propose to evaluate an innovative cognitive-behavioral smoking cessation intervention for low-income, minority women conducted in the prenatal and postpartum phases. Considering the strong link between tobacco use and cancer risk, the development of effective smoking cessation treatments has important health implications for cancer prevention and control initiatives. The aims to be addressed are: Aim 1: To compare an enhanced Cognitive-Behavioral Counseling (CBC) smoking cessation intervention with a Best Practice control condition (BP) for reducing smoking rates (i.e., continued abstinence, 7-day point prevalence, and number of cigarettes smoked) in the short- and long-term among pregnant women. It is hypothesized that smokers receiving CBC will show reduced rates of tobacco use, versus those in the BP, over time. Aim 2: To evaluate the impact of the CBC intervention on the hypothesized mediators of behavior change (i.e., heightened risk perceptions; enhanced self-efficacy and reduced fatalistic beliefs; high pros and low cons of quitting; reduced emotional distress). It is hypothesized that the psychosocial factors will mediate the effect of the CBC intervention on change of smoking behaviors.