Scientists say that it's easier for a smoker to quit if someone in his peer group has quitted smoking. If a husband plans to quit smoking, he could influence his wife to quit, or vice versa, workers to colleagues, brothers to sisters and friends to friends, the American study has found.
The findings, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, are gathered from 32 years of data from a network of more than 12,000 people who participated in the Framingham Heart Study, launched in 1948 in Massachusetts.
The study found that siblings were 25 percent less likely to smoke if one of them quit, while the friend of someone who quitted smoking was 36 percent less likely to smoke. The act of quitting passes through a social network where even co-workers are influential. If there is a quitter in some small firms, it could lead to decreased smoking among peers by 34 percent, the researchers said.
However, the same is not true in the case of neighbors, the study found, as they have to know somebody closely who is quitting the habit. The better you know a person who is kicking the habit, researchers found, the more likely you are to give up yourself.
Study co-author James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego said smokers are no longer at the center of the circles and tend to have fewer friends and tend to be connected to fewer people. Researchers also found that the more educated people were, the more likely they were to influence smoking behavior.
Prevention and treatment programs for health-related behaviors such as quitting smoking, losing weight and exercising could become more efficient by taking advantage of the network effect, the authors concluded.
