The contribution of clinic-based interventions to reduce prenatal smoking prevalence among US women

We sought to estimate the effect of universal implementation of a clinic-based, psychosocial smoking cessation intervention for pregnant women.

We used data from US birth certificates (2005) and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (2004) to estimate the number of women smoking at conception. To calculate the number of women eligible to receive the cessation intervention, we used estimates from the literature of the percentage of women who quit spontaneously (23%), entered prenatal care before the third trimester (96.5%), and disclosed smoking to their provider (75%). We used the pooled relative risk (RR) for continued smoking from the 2004 Cochrane Review as our measure of the intervention's effectiveness (RR = 0.94).

We estimated that 944,240 women smoked at conception. Of these, 23.0% quit spontaneously, 6.3% quit with usual care, and an additional 3.3% quit because of the intervention, leaving 67.4% smoking throughout pregnancy. The calculated smoking prevalence in late pregnancy decreased from 16.4% to 15.6% because of the intervention.

Universal implementation of a best-practice, clinic-based intervention would increase the total number of quitters but would not substantially reduce smoking prevalence among pregnant women.