Study examines impact of exercise on older women who smoke

Dr. Cheryl Oncken, associate professor of medicine, has received a five-year, $4 million federal grant to study whether exercise can help older women quit smoking and improve their overall health.

“Our goal is to study whether an exercise program can help postmenopausal women quit smoking and abstain from cigarettes,” says Oncken, a nationally recognized expert on smoking cessation, who received the grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“Most smoking research focuses on healthy women. Our study is looking at post-menopausal women who have a greater risk of lower bone density, depression, and weight gain, and other health problems than younger women,” says Oncken.

About 30 percent of female smokers are postmenopausal, and the proportion is expected to grow as the population ages. Smokers generally know about the harmful effects of smoking and want to stop, but most people have a hard time quitting.

“It takes an average of three to five attempts to finally kick the habit,” says Oncken, who has studied the use of various medications and behavioral therapies designed to help people abstain from smoking.

“Our aim is to find the most effective treatment or combination of treatments to help people achieve their goal.”

The study, which is being conducted in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, will recruit about 300 postmenopausal women. All the women will receive smoking cessation treatment consisting of behavioral counseling and the medication varenicline; they will then be randomly assigned to either a supervised exercise program or a supervised relaxation control program.

“We hypothesize that women in the exercise program will have greater abstinence rates at the end of treatment and at the end of a year than women in the relaxation program,” Oncken says.