Text Messages Help Smokers Quit
First, it was thegory cigarette warning labels. Now, could stop-smoking text messages be next?
A new study in the journalThe Lancetshows that smokers who receive encouragingtext messagesthrough a program called "txt2stop" are twice as likely to quit the habit after six months, compared to smokers who didn't get any encouraging messages.
Out of 5,800 smokers in the study, more than 10 percent who received the encouraging messages quit, compared to just 4.9 percent of smokers who didn't receive the text messages.
The participants' saliva was tested to make sure they had actually given up smoking, BBC News reported.
In the study, conducted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical, one group was able to text words like "lapse" and "crave" to a phone number, and received anencouraging text messagein return, CNET reported. The other group of people, however, only got one text message every two weeks, and the message only thanked them for being part of the study.
"People described txt2stop as being like having a friend encouraging them or an angel on their shoulder," study researcher Dr. Caroline Free told BBC News. "It helped peopleresist the temptation to smoke."
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
