People who get paid to stop smoking are three times more likely to kick the habit for at least six months, new research has shown.

 

People have overheard about the hazards of cigarettes smoking. According to most recent estimates, smoking is the top cause of preventable death in the United States, killing about 438,000 people each year. Among them, about 38,000 are non-smokers who just inhale tobacco smoke from the others. If the governments fail to adopt more aggressive measures to combat the smoking addiction, this century, tobacco will kill one billion people worldwide.

 

People have been always told about the diseases that smoking can cause such as cancers of the lung, stomach, larynx, mouth and pharynx, esophagus, pancreas, bladder and kidney and early cardiovascular disease. About half of all long-term smokers, particularly those who began smoking as teens, die prematurely, many in middle age.

 

Apparently, all these things can do nothing to prevent smoking, studies have shown. So, researchers have wondered if money can do it, and, surprisingly, the answer is yes. According to a study published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, paying people to stop smoking is working. The study involved 878 General Electric workers at 85 different facilities around the United States. They were divided in two equal groups. Both groups received information about smoking-cessation programs.

 

However, people in one of the groups were rewarded with as much as $750 in cash as follows: $100 for completing a smoking-cessation program, $250 if they stopped smoking within six months after enrolling in the study and $400 for continuing to abstain from smoking for an additional six months.

 

The study showed that about 15 percent of people rewarded to quit smoking had stayed off cigarettes after nine to 12 months, compared to just 5 percent of the unpaid group. Moreover, four times as many people getting money completed a smoking cessation program.

 

“Incentive programs work if they're well designed and adequately funded. If you do a low-budget incentive program, it may have little effect. Our study shows that if you're able to get people smoke-free and keep them smoke-free for six months or more, there's a fighting chance they can stay smoke-free on their own,” said Kevin G. Volpp, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who led the study.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped fund the study, estimates that smoking costs companies about $3,400 per smoking employee annually, or about $7.18 per pack of cigarettes, in health-care bills, reduced productivity and absenteeism.

 

Volpp is not at the first study of this kind. In a similar study published in December in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he showed that people who were paid to lose weight dropped 13 to 14 pounds on average after 16 weeks, compared with a loss of 3.9 pounds by those who weren’t rewarded.