The status of tobacco cessation research for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this case study was to describe the status of tobacco cessation research among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. METHODS The author conducted a review of the literature and reviewed studies that he was familiar with. FINDINGS Tobacco cessation research for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders has been very scant. Only two peer-reviewed studies focused on smoking cessation research targeted at any Asian American or Pacific Islander population were identified. One of these studies was the Suc Khoe La Vang! ("Health is Gold") intervention funded by the California Department of Health Services to the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project at the University of California, San Francisco. This involved a two-year, community-based, controlled trial with multi-component programs such as Vietnamese language media-based activities, Vietnamese language smoking cessation materials written by and for Vietnamese, continuing medical education for Vietnamese physicians. They used a pre-test, posttest design comparing the intervention community of Santa Clara County, CA with the non-intervention community of Houston, TX. After two years, the smoking prevalence rates between the two communities were not significantly different. The other was the "Lay-led Smoking Cessation Approach for S.E. Asian men" funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to The Ohio State University. This particular study was conducted over a six-year period and involved the indigenous model. That is, lay adults from the targeted Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese communities were trained to engage other Southeast Asian men to facilitate their quitting smoking. In comparison to the non-intervened group, the intervention group engaged in more quit attempts and reported a higher rate of smoking cessation (17%) versus the control group (1%). This study demonstrates the potential for successfully initiating quitting attempts but also illustrates the necessity for the intervention to incorporate linguistic, cultural, social environmental, physiological, and cognitive factors in achieving cessation. Furthermore, cessation should be documented not only by self-report but by biochemical verification. The extreme paucity of smoking cessation research for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders mean that much needs to be initiated, implemented, evaluated, and researched. In so doing, we conclude that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are not "hard-to-reach", but hardly reached. CONCLUSIONS As of February 2001, only two studies relating to tobacco cessation research targeting any Asian American or Pacific Islander populations had been reported in the peer-reviewed literature. Evidences for the effectiveness of these two cases, one in California, and the other in Ohio were cited.