Sustaining Smoking Cessation in Smokers With Kids With Asthma

Parents of Asthmatics Quit Smoking (PAQS-2) is a randomized controlled trial of a smoking cessation intervention for parents who smoke. Children had either a diagnosis of asthma (and an asthma emergency within the past 3 months) or were healthy (and had no medical conditions in the past 3 months). The study intervention aimed to help parents (or caregivers) quit smoking and reduce children's second hand smoke exposure. Participants received 2 home counseling sessions with asthma education (if they had a child with asthma), child wellness (if they had a healthy child) and smoking cessation counseling (including objective feedback on how much smoke the child was exposed to). Parents of children with asthma were then randomized into 2 groups; one group received 6 counseling phone calls focused on motivating smoking cessation and a second round of feedback on smoke exposure (Enhanced). The other groups received six calls focused on asthma (PAM asthma group) or child wellness (Healthy group). We had 2 primary aims. First, to explore the "teachable moment" we compared quit rates between the parents of children with asthma to the parents of healthy children. We hypothesized that the Asthma group would have significantly greater quit rates than the Healthy group and lower levels of environmental tobacco smoke in the home. We also hypothesized that parents who smoke and have children with asthma would have greater changes in the variables associated with teachable moment compared to parents who smoke and have a healthy child. --- The second primary aim focused on the parents of children with asthma. We assessed the effectiveness of adding telephone smoking cessation counseling to the 2 home counseling visits. For this, we compared the 2 groups of randomized subjects: those who received 6 counseling calls and feedback on smoke exposure (PAM-Enhanced) and those who received 6 counseling calls focused on asthma education (PAM-Asthma). We hypothesized that the PAM-Enhanced group