Background: Pediatricians following clinical practice guidelines for tobacco intervention (“Ask, Advise, and Refer” [AAR]) can motivate parents to reduce child tobacco smoke exposure (TSE). However, brief clinic interventions are unable to provide the more intensive, evidence-based behavioral treatments that facilitate the knowledge, skills, and confidence that parents need to both reduce child TSE and quit smoking. We hypothesized that a multilevel treatment model integrating pediatric clinic-level AAR with individual-level, telephone counseling would promote greater long-term (12-month) child TSE reduction and parent smoking cessation than clinic-level AAR alone.
Methods: Pediatricians were trained to implement AAR with parents during clinic visits and reminded via prompts embedded in electronic health records. Following AAR, parents were randomized to intervention (AAR + counseling) or nutrition education attention control (AAR + control). Child TSE and parent quit status were bioverified.
Results: Participants (n = 327) were 83% female, 83% African American, and 79% below the poverty level. Child TSE (urine cotinine) declined significantly in both conditions from baseline to 12 months (p = 0.001), with no between-group differences. The intervention had a statistically significant effect on 12-month bioverified quit status (p = 0.029): those in the intervention group were 2.47 times more likely to quit smoking than those in the control. Child age was negatively associated with 12-month log-cotinine (p = 0.01), whereas nicotine dependence was positively associated with 12-month log-cotinine levels (p = 0.001) and negatively associated with bioverified quit status (p = 0.006).
Conclusions: Pediatrician advice alone may be sufficient to increase parent protections of children from TSE. Integrating clinic-level intervention with more intensive individual-level smoking intervention is necessary to promote parent cessation.
Keywords: intervention; pediatric; secondhand smoke; smoking cessation; tobacco control.