AMHERST, Mass. (WWLP)--A new report finds that rewards and financial incentives are helping people quit smoking, including pregnant persons. A University of Massachusetts Amherst public health and health policy researcher co-led the study. Trinity Health suggests patients to wear masks The new Cochrane review included 47 mixed-population studies based in the U.S., Europe, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and South Africa, including 14 new to this review, with just under 22,000 participants. Separately, the researchers looked at 13 studies from the U.S., United Kingdom and France, with 3,942 pregnant people participating. For every 100 pregnant persons who received financial incentives, 13 were likely to successfully quit smoking at six months or longer, compared to six in 100 who did not receive financial incentives.  “When we updated this review, we found more studies of financial incentives in people who are pregnant and found high-certainty evidence this time that indeed they help people who are pregnant quit smoking and stay quit,” says senior author Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, assistant professor of health policy and promotion in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences.   “We know that smoking while pregnant can be really harmful to both the parent and the fetus,” said Hartmann-Boyce. “And people are more cautious in pregnancy about using a lot of the pharmacological interventions that are approved for smoking cessation. So that’s why we’re focused on ways that we can help pregnant people quit smoking.”  “Smoking is the leading preventable cause of ill health and early death worldwide, and quitting smoking is vitally important to help people live in good health for longer,” says lead author Caitlin Notley, professor of addiction sciences at UEA’s Norwich Medical School. “We are now very confident that incentives help people, and pregnant people too, to quit smoking better than not offering incentives.”   California became the first state to offer financial incentives, such as small-value gift cards, via Medicaid to people who quit using stimulants, such as methamphetamines and cocaine. This incentives program, also known as “contingency management,” is considered the best evidence-based approach to treating stimulant use disorder. Since California received federal approval in 2021 to cover contingency management as a Medicaid benefit, 14 more states have begun offering incentives. “The other common misperception around financial incentives is this idea that, oh, all these people are able to quit smoking, and they just weren’t because they weren’t going to get paid,” explained Hartmann-Boyce. “Actually, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this intervention is acting on the psychological reward systems in the brain, which we know are heavily involved with nicotine addiction. So, it’s not that these people could have quit anyway and then were paid and decided to do so. A lot of people in these studies have tried to quit many times, they really want to quit and weren’t able to do so, and this helped them.” The research was led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) in collaboration with UMass Amherst, the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh.