Discuss the prevalence and importance of smoking cessation

For most smokers, quitting for good takes time and multiple quit attempts. In 2010, 48.3% of recent smokers reported making a quit attempt in the previous year. The target for Healthy People 2020 is to increase this to 80%. However, over the decade ending in 2010, there was little change in this proportion. Between 45-48% of all smokers reported making such an attempt during each year in the decade.
There is a priority on encouraging early-onset smokers to make a quit attempt before they ramp up their habit to a higher daily dose of nicotine. Studies suggest that quitting success is higher among motivated smokers who smoke fewer cigarettes. High school smokers were more likely than adult smokers to report making a quit attempt. In 2010, 58.4% reported making an attempt, which was slightly lower than the proportion who reported an attempt in 2003 (60%). The Healthy People 2020 objective is to increase the proportion who make a quit attempt to 64%.

It has been argued that the proportion of recent smokers who have quit for at least 6 months is a reasonable marker of future success in staying off smoking (Hughes et al.,1992; Pierce et al., 1998), even though at least 20% will still relapse. The proportion of recent smokers who indicated that they had quit for 6 months was 6.0% in 2008 and 6.7% in 2011. The 2020 objective is to increase this further to 8.0%.

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