$4 Million Grant Aims to “Snuff Out” Tobacco

The National Cancer Institute has awarded a four-year, $4 million grant to a tobacco researcher at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to expand a tobacco-cessation program begun two years ago.

This funding allows continuation of a professional education program that trains Texas physicians in techniques designed to help their patients stop using tobacco.

“To date, more than 1,100 Texas health care professionals have participated in the program,” says Alexandre V. Prokhorov, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the department of behavioral science and principal investigator of the Tobacco Outreach Education Program grant.

The program is offered free to all Texas physicians and health care providers. Tobacco settlement funds from 1998 have supported tobacco education outreach since the program’s inception in 2000.

“We will also train additional members of the health care network, such as pharmacists, to help educate consumers about how to stop smoking,” Prokhorov says.

The Tobacco Outreach Education Program at M.D. Anderson is offered in three formats, including live and videotaped presentations and Web-based training. Various institutions have requested these educational and teaching materials and have promoted the program materials throughout.

This new grant is part of a multipronged approach by M.D. Anderson’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Program to eliminate tobacco use. The program also includes research studies investigating various targeted interventions to determine the best ways to help smokers quit the habit.

In addition to educating health care professionals, M.D. Anderson researchers continue enrolling participants in tobacco cessation clinical trials to discover more effective ways of helping individuals stop smoking. Current studies include:

Project LIFT (Learning Intervention for Freedom from Tobacco)

The project is designed for smokers suffering depression. M.D. Anderson investigators are comparing two behavioral counseling smoking-cessation treatments, combined with the nicotine patch, for treating depressed smokers. Participants will be randomly assigned to either the mood management or behavioral counseling treatment.

Project STOP

Designed to test the effectiveness of a treatment program that includes the nicotine patch, self-help materials and counseling, this study includes hand-held computers that are programmed with individualized, situation-specific coping strategies, motivational and supportive messages.

National Lung Cancer Screening Trial

Researchers are recruiting current and former smokers to participate in the largest lung cancer screening study ever conducted. M.D. Anderson is among 30 sites across the United States recruiting 50,000 smokers, to determine whether spiral computed tomography or chest X-ray is better at detecting lung cancer. M.D. Anderson is the only participating site in the entire southwest United States, and intends to recruit 1,000 current and former smokers.

For more information, or to enroll in Project LIFT or Project STOP, call (713) 792-2265. For more information on the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, call (713) 792-5340. More information about all available studies may be accessed online at www.mdanderson.org.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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