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Try Pack Mentality To Quit Tobacco

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The Associated Press

Published: May 22, 2008

LOS ANGELES - The urge to smoke is contagious, but quitting apparently is, too.

A team of researchers who showed that obesity can spread person-to-person has found a similar pattern with smoking cessation: A smoker is more likely to kick the habit if a spouse, friend, co-worker or sibling did.

What's more, smokers tend to quit in groups and those who don't stop puffing increasingly find themselves pushed to the edge of their social circles, the researchers found.

"Your smoking behavior depends upon not just the smoking behavior of the people you know, but also the people who they know" and so on, said Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the new report.

The findings back up studies showing peer influence plays a key role in people's decision to stop lighting up and provide evidence that the "buddy system" used by smoking cessation, weight loss and alcoholism programs to change addictive behavior works.

"Anecdotally, we hear people say they quit smoking because their spouse or friend quit," said Jennifer Unger, a smoking prevention expert at the University of Southern California who had no role in the study. "If you influence a few people, those people might go on to help others to quit."

Last year, Christakis and his colleague James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, published a study suggesting that obesity can spread among friends, much like an infectious disease. The duo mined data from a large social network of people who had been followed for three decades and found that when one person gained weight, close friends tended to pack on the pounds, too.

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