RE: Ask-Advise-Connect: Differential Enrollment and Smoking Cessation Outcomes Between Primary Care Patients Who Received Quitline-Delivered Treatment in Spanish vs English

We are writing to you as aspiring physicians who read your Ask-Advise-Connect smoking cessation intervention with great interest. Your work provides valuable insights into the smoking behaviors and outcomes among a large sample of Texas adults, and we would like to thank you for your contribution to the field. However, when reading your work, we accumulated some questions and thoughts that would be best answered by you.

In reviewing the results, we noted that overall smoking cessation rates were much higher among the Spanish-preferring patients. As such, we wondered if you explored and/or plan to explore underlying reason(s) for Spanish-preferring patients completing more counseling calls. Since the Spanish-preferring patients were initially less likely to be smokers, could this increase their social capital in terms of smoking cessation?

Furthermore, while this study does provide a promising approach for Spanish-preferring patients, smoking prevalence was significantly higher among English-preferring patients. Do you have insight into how Ask-Advise-Connect participation be enhanced among English-preferring patients? Were there differences in mode of delivery between populations that impacted cessation levels?

We are curious as to whether your team plans to administer patient surveys to gain insights on their motivations, sociodemographic characteristics, and nicotine dependence proxies. We believe that collecting and analyzing these data could unlock significant information that hold the key to improving cessation rates among English- and Spanish-preferring patients.