OBJECTIVETo study the association between reasons for smoking and results related to successful smoking cessation.

METHODSA community-based case-control study was conducted with 642 male adults recognized as successful spontaneous smoking quitters being the subject cases while another 700 male adults who had failed to quit smoking were served as the controls. Russell Reason for Smoking Questionnaire (RRSQ) was used to investigate the reasons for smoking. Dominance logistic regression was performed to determine the relative importance of reasons for starting smoking and the endpoint of successful quit smoking.

RESULTSAfter adjusting the potential confounders of age, age of smoking initiation, marital status, profession, and education, the adjusted means of sedative and stimulation of RRSQ in the successful quitters were significant lower than that in the failed quitters. Results from the dominance logistic regression showed that the first two important factors for smoking cessation were sedative and stimulation of RRSQ, followed by psychological image, automatic, hand-mouth activity, indulgence, and addiction.

CONCLUSIONThis study demonstrated that factors as dependence-addiction showed more important impacts than the social-psychological ones on the endpoint of successful smoking cessation.