A new research article titled ‘An mHealth (Mobile Health) Intervention for Smoking Cessation in People With Tuberculosis: A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial’ has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The study was led by Kamran Siddiqi, Professor of Public Health at Hull York Medical School, with significant contributions from the ARK Foundation team—Prof. Dr. Rumana Huque (Executive Director), Asiful Haidar Chowdhury, Fahmidur Rahman, and Shakhawat Hossain Rana—under the Quit4TB Project.
The cluster randomized trial included 1,080 tuberculosis patients who smoked across Bangladesh and Pakistan, comparing supportive text-message–based interventions with standard printed cessation information.
𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬:
1. Smoking cessation at 6 months: 41.7% in the text-message group vs 15.3% in usual care.
2. Mortality: Lower in the text-message group (3.5%) vs usual care (7.5%).
3. Intervention was affordable, feasible, and easily integrated into routine TB care.
Recommendations:
1. Incorporate mHealth text-message interventions into TB programs to support quitting tobacco.
2. Use scalable, low-cost digital solutions to improve TB recovery and patient outcomes.
3. Expand similar interventions to other high-TB-burden settings for broader public health impact.
