Revista de biometría y bioestadística

Background: Promotion of smoking cessation has been proposed as one of the primary areas of focus for tobacco control in developing countries as prevalence is high over there. This paper aimed to analyze statistically quitting method followed by the smokers who wanted to quit tobacco use in the past 12 months of the survey.

Methods: The paper was based on secondary data of size 9629 collected from people aged 15 years and above by the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS), 2010. Descriptive analysis and binary logistic regression had been performed using STATA-13 to analyze the data. Outcome variable was whether quitting method(s) was (were) followed by the tobacco user (1. Tobacco smoker, and 2. Smokeless tobacco user) who wanted to quit tobacco use in the past 12 months of the survey and independent variables were age, gender, residential status, education, occupation and wealth index.

Results: It had been found that 47.38% of smoker respondents tried to quit tobacco smoking and among them 27.13% used any method to quit. It had been also found that among the smokeless tobacco users, 31.89% tried to quit and among them 24.83% used any method to quit. Among the quitting methods, counselling was the most used method. From the logistic regression to methods used to quitting tobacco use, it had been found that age, education and wealth index were significantly associated with the use of methods to quit tobacco smoking; whereas, gender, age and wealth index were statistically significant to the use of methods to quit smokeless tobacco.

Conclusions: This study suggests that more active quitting methods should be invented targeting male, younger, lower educated and poorer tobacco users to make the cessation successful in Bangladesh.