
Media Contact
Sam Fahmy
Director of Communications
School of Public Health
[email protected]
iQuit Mindfully to be linguistically, culturally adapted to serve Hispanic and Latinx communities
ATLANTA—A mindfulness-based smoking cessation tool developed by Georgia State University researchers will reach a wider, more diverse audience thanks to a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
iQuit Mindfully, which was developed by a team led by Associate Professor Claire Spears in the School of Public Health, has been shown to help smokers quit, with up to 35 percent of participants successfully quitting after using the tool, compared to 7 percent for the general population.
Spears noted that mindfulness training helps people to recognize triggers such as stress, cravings and withdrawal symptoms, accept them for what they are and more skillfully manage them without turning to tobacco, alcohol or other drugs. Most mindfulness research has focused on predominantly white and relatively affluent populations, but Spears and her team specifically developed iQuit Mindfully to meet the needs of diverse and low-socioeconomic-status populations.
“iQuit Mindfully was designed on a text messaging platform to make it readily available and easily accessible, almost like having a therapist in your pocket,” Spears said. “Even though people know the responses are coming from an automated computer program, they say things like ‘I felt like I had a coach,’ or ‘I felt like a had a cheerleader.’”
Users receive reminders based on their personal reasons for wanting to quit smoking — for their children, for example, or to save money — and can receive 24/7 support by texting words such as “crave” for information on managing cravings or “stress” for tips on managing stress. Users also receive text messages that remind them to practice mindfulness through breath awareness or meditation.
The researchers will linguistically and culturally adapt iQuit Mindfully for Hispanic and Latinx adults in partnership with organizations such as the Hispanic Health Coalition of Georgia and community connections that have been created through Georgia State’s Prevention Research Center. They also will evaluate and refine the tool through iterative testing and disseminate it widely through the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network.
“Since its establishment in 2019, the GSU Prevention Research Center has been building partnerships with community members and organizations to improve health,” said Michael Eriksen, Regents’ Professor in the School of Public Health and co-principal investigator on the project. “With this latest project, we are addressing the leading cause of preventable death and disease in a population whose members are less likely to receive smoking cessation counseling despite their high interest in quitting.”
Spears noted that the substantial decline in smoking rates in the U.S. since the 1950s has been a huge public health success, but smoking today is much more common among people with low socioeconomic status, and it also varies by racial and ethnic groups.
“iQuit Mindfully has shown tremendous promise,” she said, “and we’re excited about getting it into the hands of even more people who could benefit from it.”
In addition to Spears and Eriksen, GSU faculty and staff involved in the iQuit Mindfully expansion are:
- Shannon Self-Brown, Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Behavioral Sciences
- Mary Helen O’Connor, Prevention Research Center community engagement specialist
Research reported in this news release was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers U48DP006835-01 and R01CA237004-05. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the agencies.
— Story by Sam Fahmy