Does the Diagnosis of Bladder Cancer Lead to Higher Rates of Smoking Cessation? Findings from the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey.

Purpose: Smoking is the most common risk factor for bladder cancer and it is associated with adverse clinical outcomes. The bladder cancer diagnosis represents a teachable moment for smoking cessation. We investigated the likelihood of smoking cessation after bladder cancer diagnosis in a population database.

Materials And Methods: We evaluated the 1998 to 2013 SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results)-MHOS (Medicare Health Outcomes Survey) data on all patients diagnosed with incident bladder cancer on whom survey data were available before and after diagnosis. We compared these patients to propensity matched noncancer controls and to a cohort of patients with incident renal cell carcinoma. Differences in smoking cessation were compared between the groups and multivariate logistic regression was performed to assess the likelihood of smoking cessation.

Results: We propensity matched 394 patients with newly diagnosed bladder cancer to 1,970 noncancer controls and compared them with 169 patients with incident renal cell carcinoma. Baseline smoking prevalence was more common in patients diagnosed with bladder cancer compared to renal cell carcinoma (16% vs 11%) but the difference was not significant. The smoking cessation rate in patients with bladder cancer was 27% compared with 21% in noncancer controls and 26% in patients with renal cell carcinoma (p = 0.30 and 0.90, respectively). There was no significant difference in the adjusted OR of quitting smoking in patients with bladder cancer vs those with renal cell carcinoma compared to noncancer controls (OR 1.3, 95% CI 0.7-2.5 vs OR 1.2, 95% CI 0.4-3.6). Independent predictors of smoking cessation in patients with bladder cancer included age (p = 0.03), African American race (p = 0.03) and college education (p = 0.01).

Conclusions: Compared to propensity matched noncancer controls smoking cessation did not significantly differ after a diagnosis of bladder cancer. The proportion of individuals who quit was low overall, suggesting that improved efforts are needed to use this teachable moment in patients with bladder cancer.