Five year follow-up of a smoking withdrawal clinic population

Eight hundred volunteers who attended smoking clinics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute from 1964-1965 were followed up five years later to ascertain their current smoking status. From three waves of a mailed questionnaire, plus a telephone campaign, we obtained 559 usable responses. The relationship between smoking status at the five-year follow-up and clinic protocols and selected social and psychological characteristics as determined during the clinics were examined. Of those individuals contacted five years after the clinic, 17.8 per cent were not smoking. Variations in clinic protocol in terms of drugs and education methods had no relation to long-term smoking withdrawal. Several social and psychological variables, however, were related to smoking behavior five years after the clinics. Non-smokers were more likely than smokers to be males, to be older, to have smoked less before the clinic, to have started smoking at a later age, to have a milieu that was supportive of their stopping, and to have fewer indices of neurosis and fewer psychosomatic symptoms.