“There are a number of proven strategies out there for quitting smoking, and now we have growing evidence that text messaging is another option for quitting,” said Lorien Abroms, a behavioral scientist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who led the study. That success rate among text users is in line with other types of smoking-cessation support, like telephone quitlines, Abroms and her colleagues point out in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. It’s also in keeping with results from other studies of text messaging to help smokers quit (see Reuters Health story of November 14, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/SWlAWm). “I started with thinking about emails for helping people quit smoking and then I just saw cell phones taking off as a big change in communication tech and (saw) how we can use them to change health behavior,” Abroms told Reuters Health.

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