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TEHRAN, November 24 -Some smokers can make up to 30 attempts before they ultimately quit, while others fall off the wagon due to emotional exhaustion.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Some smokers can make up to 30 attempts before they ultimately quit, while others fall off the wagon due to emotional exhaustion.
That's what authors of a study published in the November issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology call "cessation fatigue." Their work attempts to predict which smokers will likely stop fighting urges to smoke and fall off the wagon.
"We all know the stories of people who have tried and tried but repeatedly failed. Think about the cognitive and emotional toll that must take," Matthew J. Carpenter, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Medical University of South Carolina and senior author on the article, said in a press release. "People get burnt out or exhausted from making repeated attempts and this study shows that has an effect on smoking cessation milestones."
The study measured a spike in cessation fatigue within the first six weeks of a smoker's attempt to quit. Smokers with higher cessation fatigue took longer to make an attempt to quit or were more likely to relapse after they did attempt. Within that group, the likelihood that they could go through a two-month period without smoking for a week decreased drastically.
This matters because smoking cessation fatigue has risen even as the indicators of relapse, like withdrawal symptoms, have fallen.
"This could be like a triage where you could quickly give it to people and see where they're at on this fatigue level," said Bryan W. Heckman, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at MUSC, in a press release. "If they're high or elevated, then that might be an intervention point to help them reduce their fatigue."
Today, only 14 percent of Americans smoke, and more than 40 percent of smokers never attempt to quit.
Each year, the habit costs the U.S. more than $300 billions in healthcare costs and more than 480,000 in lost lives, according to the NIH.
Some drugs currently on the market to fight the addiction can also fight cessation fatigue, experts say.
But technology can also play a part in curbing the problem.
Source: UPI
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