[From AMA Morning Rounds 01/24/20]

The New York Times (1/23, Kaplan) says that on Thursday, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office released a report (PDF) on smoking cessation highlighting the variety of proven smoking cessation tools available to smokers. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams “urged smokers to use a range of cessation methods that have been proven effective – and cautioned that e-cigarettes have not.” In an interview, Dr. Adams said, 40% “of smokers don’t get advised to quit. That was a shocking statistic to me, and it’s a little embarrassing as a health professional.” The report also “recommended that doctors and public health officials devote more attention to offering smoking cessation assistance to gay and transgender people, Native Americans, people with mental illness diagnoses and several other groups with high smoking rates.”

CNN (1/23, Howard) reports Dr. Adams said that physicians need to encourage their patients to quit smoking and that the number of smokers who do not receive such counsel from their physicians “jumped out” at him. The article says that “behavioral counseling has been found to increase chances of quitting smoking and seven medications have been approved for helping adults quit smoking: five forms of nicotine replacement therapy and two non-nicotine medications, varenicline and bupropion, according to advice from the surgeon general.”

MedPage Today (1/23, Frieden) reports that “the percentage of Americans who smoke – 14%, or 34 million people – is at an all-time low, but smoking still remains the number one cause of preventable disease, death, and disability” in the U.S., according to the report from the Surgeon General.