Abstract
Weight gain is often associated with smoking cessation and may discourage smokers from quitting. This study estimated the weight gained one year after smoking cessation and examined the risk factors associated with weight gain in order to identify socio-demographic groups at higher risk of increased weight after quitting. We analyzed data from 750 adults in two randomized controlled studies that included smokers motivated to quit and found a gradient in weight gain according to the actual duration of abstinence during follow-up. Subjects who were abstinent for at least 40 weeks gained 4.6 kg (SD = 3.8) on average, compared to 1.2 kg (SD = 2.6) for those who were abstinent less than 20 weeks during the 1-year follow-up. Considering the duration of abstinence as an exposure variable, we found an age effect and a significant interaction between sex and the amount of smoking before quitting: younger subjects gained more weight than older subjects; among light smokers, men gained more weight on average than women one year after quitting, while the opposite was observed among heavy smokers. Young women smoking heavily at baseline had the highest risk of weight gain after quitting.
Highlights
Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of mortality and is responsible for nearly six million deaths worldwide [1]
We studied weight gain one year after smoking cessation according to the overall time spent abstinent during follow-up, which was treated as an exposure variable
This combined data analysis can be regarded as an individual participant data meta-analysis [24], though we were not interested in the main outcome of the source randomized controlled trials (RCTs), i.e., smoking cessation rate, but in a secondary pooled data analysis of the weight gain associated with smoking cessation
Summary
Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of mortality and is responsible for nearly six million deaths worldwide [1]. Weight gain after smoking cessation is a major drawback [2,3,4,5] and often discourages smokers from quitting, or may even precipitate a relapse [6,7]. The existence of weight gain after smoking cessation is widely recognized, the estimation of its magnitude is variable. 1980s estimated a weight gain of 1.8 to 3.6 kg one year after smoking cessation [8,9]. A recent meta-analysis based on 62 intervention studies completed in the 1990s and 2000s estimated that 4.7 kg are gained one year after smoking cessation [10]
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