Asian-language smokers use quit lines

SAN DIEGO, March 19 (UPI) -- Those who speak an Asian language are actively using the services of smoking quit lines in California, U.S. researchers said.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, led by Shu-Hong Zhu, examined more than 15 years of data from the California Smokers' Helpline and compared the use of Asian-language services by Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese callers to the use of English-language services by Caucasian callers.

Most state smoking quit lines provide counseling services in English and Spanish only but multiple Asian languages -- Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects), Korean and Vietnamese -- are offered by the California Smokers' Helpline.

Between 1993 and 2008, the California Smokers' Helpline received 22,061 calls from Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese individuals on its Asian-language lines, and 259,979 calls from Caucasians on its English line.

The researchers estimated the number of smokers in each group in California using data from the California Health Interview Surveys, and then put the population estimates and the Helpline data together to compute quit line usage rates for each group.

They found smokers speaking Asian languages were just as likely to use the quit line as English-speaking Caucasians were, and that California's anti-smoking media campaign -- which appears in multiple languages -- was the main driver of Asian calls.

The findings are published in The American Journal of Public Health.