| Summary: | Introduction
This study aimed to test whether school-going adolescents who
self-report tobacco and/or supari use are more likely to quit if a school-based
psychosocial cessation intervention is added to an existing life-skills and tobaccoprevention
program.
Methods
A quasi-experimental trial with pre-test and post-test 20 weeks after
the intervention was conducted with students from low-income families in 12
schools in Mumbai; six schools were randomly assigned to the intervention and
the remaining to the comparison condition. Participants were students from
grades 7, 8 and 9 who self-reported tobacco and/or supari use. Intervention
schools received six sessions of LifeFirst, a psychosocial group-based tobacco
cessation intervention program, in addition to SuperArmy, a school-wide lifeskills
and tobacco-prevention program. Trained counselors facilitated the
cessation intervention, which spanned five months. All students in comparison
schools received only SuperArmy. The outcome measures were self-reported use
of tobacco-only, supari-only, and tobacco plus supari in the past 30 days.
Results
The number of all users decreased by 19.1% in the intervention and
18.7% in the comparison schools at post-test. Although this reduction was
significant (p<0.001) within each group, the difference between intervention and
comparison schools was not significant. Further segregation by type of product
used showed that for tobacco-only users there was a non-significant increase of
1.7% in intervention schools, and a significant 26.2% increase (p<0.001) in the
comparison group. Tobacco plus supari use declined in both groups; however,
supari-only use fell by 14.8% in the intervention and 32.7% in the comparison
schools (p<0.01).
Conclusions
The combination of a cessation intervention along with the life-skills
and tobacco-prevention program appear to have halted tobacco-only use in the
intervention group. Future research needs to determine whether students are
substituting supari for tobacco and to understand the psychological mechanisms
underlying the cessation intervention and the interaction between cessation and
prevention-only interventions.
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