Smoke-free law in Spain and trend in smoking cessation according educational level
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Author(s)
Enrique Regidor, Cruz Pascual and David Martínez
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| Presenter(s) |
Enrique Regidor Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain |
Abstract Smoke-free policies have been shown to reduce exposure to environmental tobacco and may have also important ‘side effects’ on smokers’ behavior as smoking cessation. This effect may be different depending on the socioeconomic status of smokers. The objective of this study was to assess whether the possible changes in quit smoking associated with Spain’s smoke-free legislation introduced in 2006 differ according to socioeconomic status in the short and in the long term.
Methods
Data from national health surveys conducted in Spain for two decades between 1993 and 2012 were used. Quit ratio was defined as the proportion of ever smokers who were former smokers. The measure of socioeconomic position was the educational level. A segmented regression analysis was carried out to assess whether there was a change in the level and/or trend of quit ratio from pre to post-intervention periods.
Results and Conclusions
The quit ratios increased shortly after the ban in all educational groups, whereas they decreased in the following years. Smoke-free legislation interrupted the upward trend in quit ratio reported in all educational groups in the previous years, but this change in the trend after the law did not show a clear socioeconomic pattern.
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Source of funding: This work was undertaken by the project “Tackling socioeconomic inequalities in smoking: learning from natural experiments by time trend analyses and cross-national comparison (SILNE)”, funded by the European Union.
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Declaration of interest: None
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