Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, director of Salud America! at the UT Health San Antonio, has received a new $1.3 million prevention grant to enable local doctors to guide patients who smoke to join a smartphone-based quit smoking service. The grant is from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) The funding will enhance tobacco screening and treatment for two groups. One is primary care patients at the UT Health Physicians medical practice. The other is oncology care patients at UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center. During routine patient visits, doctors will assess and track if a patient smokes. They will then counsel and prompt patients to use their smartphones to join Quitxt. Quitxt encourages quitting smoking via bilingual text or Facebook ...
For the first time in decades, overall tobacco use increased among high school students. This could have a big impact on Latino health. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among Latino men and the second-leading cause among Latino women. The Tobacco 21 Coalition is trying to raise the legal minimum age for cigarette purchase to 21 in San Antonio, Texas (68% Latino). Every year in Texas, 75,000 kids try smoking for the first time and 12,300 kids become regular smokers. In San Antonio, 12.6% of male high school students and 9.9% of female high school students currently smoke. These youth are more sensitive to nicotine's addictiveness because their bodies are still growing and developing, according to health experts. Thus, these youth are more likely to smoke as ...
Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez of UT Health San Antonio today received a new $1.3 million grant to expand Quitxt, her bilingual service that sends texts with culturally and regionally tailored support to help South Texan young adults quit smoking. The new grant is from the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas. The new funding will enhance the Quitxt service—currently designed to turns a user’s phone into a personal quit coach by providing texts and links to online support, educational content, music, and videos—with a new social media support component. Quitxt also will extend beyond South Texas to include English and Spanish speakers in rural counties, and Spanish speakers in urban areas of South, West and Central Texas. To quit smoking now, join Quitxt in English or ...
We know it’s not easy to quit smoking. You can do it with Quitxt! Quitxt is a UT Health San Antonio service that sends text messages with culturally and regionally tailored support to help South Texans quit smoking. The service, now available in Spanish and English, turns a user’s phone into a personal quit coach by providing texts and links to online support, educational content, music, and videos. This helps with motivation to quit, setting a quit date, handling stress, and more—and are proven to double your odds of quitting. To join in English, text “iquit” to 844-332-2058. For Spanish, text “lodejo” to 844-332-2058. “If you’re thinking about quitting smoking and you’re always on your phone, Quitxt is a perfect program for you, whether you speak ...
Smoking is a tough opponent to beat. Quitxt is a free texting service in English or Spanish that turns your mobile phone into a personal coach to help you quit smoking, using interactive and entertaining texts, online support, and music and videos from UT Health San Antonio researchers. The service’s bilingual texts help with motivation to quit, setting a quit date, finding things to do instead of smoking, handling stress, and more. Join in English: Text “iquit” to 57682. Join in Spanish: Text “lodejo” to 57682. “Text-message applications have scientifically proven to roughly double one’s odds of quitting smoking, so we developed Quitxt specifically for young adult Latinos to help them quit for good,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, study leader and director of ...
Smoking is a tough opponent to beat. Quitxt is a new free text-message service that turns your mobile phone into a personal coach to help you quit smoking, using interactive and entertaining texts, online support, and music and videos from researchers at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio. The service’s text messages help with motivation to quit, setting a quit date, finding things to do instead of smoking, handling stress, and more. To join, text “iquit” to 57682 or visit quitxt.org. “Text-message applications have scientifically proven to roughly double one’s odds of quitting smoking, so we developed Quitxt specifically for young adult Latinos to help them quit for good,” said Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez, study leader and director of the Institute for Health ...
Latino kids are more likely to start smoking and develop a daily habit than other kids, according to a new study, Reuters reports. The study, led by Sherine El-Toukhy of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, examined "smoking susceptibility," which precedes smoking behavior, of almost 144,000 non-smoking youth ages 9-21 from 1999 to 2014. Overall, the amount of smoking susceptibility rose from 21% to 23% over those 15 years. But smoking susceptibility varied by race/ethnicity: For Latino kids, it rose from 22% to 28%.
For white kids, it held steady at about 21%.
For black kids, it dropped from 21% to 17% in 2003, but rose back to 20% in 2014. Latino kids overall appeared to be as much as 67% more susceptible to smoking than white kids, ...
In majority Latino California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed a series of bills that will raise the smoking age from 18 to 21 and will limit the sale of electronic cigarettes, reports the LA Times. "[These laws] will save countless lives, reduce astronomical costs to the health care system, and cost very little because it uses existing enforcement mechanisms," said Senator Ed Hernandez, who authored the bill to raise the age of tobacco products. "Today was an enormous victory for not only this generation, but also for many generations to come who will not suffer the deadly impacts of tobacco." California joins Hawaii as the second state to raise the smoking age and to ban the selling of electronic cigarettes to anyone under 21. According to a recent study, raising the smoking ...
If you want to quit smoking, it is better to quit all at once, NBC Health reports. A study by Oxford University “randomly assigned almost 700 adult smokers to either an abrupt quitting or gradual reduction group. Each person set a 'quit day' of two weeks after they entered the study, and saw a research nurse once a week until then.” After 4 weeks of tracking 700 adults, researchers found that 40% of the gradual group were not smoking compared to 49% of the abrupt quit group. "However, with smoking, the norm is to advise people to stop all at once and our study found evidence to support that," Nicola Lindson-Hawley, lead study author told Reuters Health by email. "What we found was that more people managed to quit when they stopped smoking all in one go than when they ...
