Study Shows Financial Incentives Help Economically-Disadvantaged Pregnant Smokers Quit

http://www.uvm.edu/medicine/?Page=news&storyID=18327&category=comresne

04-19-2014
By Jennifer Nachbur
The University of Vermont

Smoking during pregnancy – particularly among economically-disadvantaged women – leads to a host of poor pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage, preterm birth, SIDS, and additional adverse effects later in life. Without a formal treatment intervention, women in this population continue to smoke, and their babies suffer. Vermont Center on Behavior and Health Director Stephen Higgins, Ph.D., and colleagues, have developed an effective behavioral economic approach that offers women financial incentives for quitting.

The groups’ most recent findings, published online this month in Preventive Medicine, demonstrated that providing incentives more than doubled smoking abstinence rates during pregnancy and increased fetal growth. They also examined whether altering the way the incentives were offered might get still more women to quit, without increasing costs, but that strategy was not successful.

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“More than 40 percent of women with a high school GED report regular smoking versus eight percent of college graduates and six percent of those with graduate degrees,” Higgins says. While about 20 percent of smokers quit without formal treatment soon after learning of a pregnancy, the vast majority of the largest segment of this group smoke through the pregnancy if there is no formal intervention.

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