Development of a new craving index for anticipating quitting smoking in patients who undergo the Japanese smoking cessation therapy

INTRODUCTION: The 10-item version of the Questionnaire of Smoking Urges (QSU-brief) has demonstrated excellent reliability. However, the QSU-brief may be too long to use in clinical settings. We developed a new craving index called the Tobacco Craving Index (TCI) and investigated how closely the TCI grade is associated with success of quitting smoking in Japanese smoking cessation therapy (SCT) patients. METHODS: The TCI questionnaire consists of two items: the first question asks about the strength of tobacco craving on a 4-point scale, and the second question asks about the frequency of tobacco craving per day on a 4-point scale. We conducted a prospective cohort study of 85 participants who underwent the Japanese SCT at a Japanese smoking cessation clinic. We administered the QSU-brief and TCI at each of the 5 sessions during the 12-week SCT. RESULTS: Significant correlations were observed between the TCI grade and QSU-brief score (r=0.27, 0.55, 0.72, 0.58 and 0.68, at the five sessions). The change in mean TCI grade showed a similar trend as the change in mean QSU-brief score among the 43 patients who succeeded in quitting smoking and also among the 7 patients who failed to quit smoking by the last session. Both TCI and QSU-brief assessed after the second session were significantly associated with the smoking status at the last session. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the success of quitting smoking in TCI grade was 0.615–0.881 at the 5 sessions, whereas it was 0.536–0.849 in QSU-brief score. CONCLUSIONS: The TCI can be used as a predictive tool for success of quitting smoking in the Japanese SCT. As the TCI consists of two questionnaire items, it can be easily administered in smoking cessation interventions.