The natural history of quitting smoking: findings from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey : Addiction Volume 104 Issue 12, Pages 2075 - 2087 Published Online: 9 Nov 2009
Aims To describe the long-term natural history of a range of potential determinants of relapse from quitting smoking.
Design, setting and participants A survey of 2502 ex-smokers of varying lengths of time quit recruited as part of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States) across five annual waves of surveying. . . .
Findings Most theorized determinants of relapse changed over time in a manner theoretically associated with reduced risk of relapse, except most notably the belief that smoking controls weight, which strengthened. Change in these determinants changed at different rates: from a rapidly asymptoting log function to a less rapidly asymptoting square-root function.
Conclusions Variation in patterns of change across time suggests that the relative importance of each factor to maintaining abstinence may similarly vary.
