Researcher details efforts to reduce smoking in patients with bladder cancer

In this video, Marc Bjurlin, DO, MSc, FACOS, discusses efforts to reduce smoking in patients with bladder cancer. He is an author of the AUA 2024 abstract “Efficacy of inpatient, evidence-based tobacco use treatment of patients with bladder cancer after radical cystectomy.” Bjurlin is director of clinical trials and an associate professor of urology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Transcription:

Does your group plan to explore further measures to reduce smoking in patients with bladder cancer? If so, what will those measures entail?

We have a couple of ideas that we're working on now. First, we want to make sure that this kind of inpatient post cystectomy smoking program is sustainable. So we're continuing this forward for a number of years, so we can actually look, was this kind of a 1-time project that we got these great numbers? Or can we actually continue this as part of our normal pathway in patients who smoke and undergo cystectomy? And then we're also transitioning a little bit, in that we studied the provider's role in providing smoking cessation. We looked at our tobacco treatment program and how they provide smoking cessation. But what we haven't done yet is really looked at the patient experience, meaning, what are the barriers and what are the facilitators that our patients have experienced in order to quit smoking? So our next goal is transitioning to really understand the patient experience and how we can support them to quit smoking cigarettes.

This transcription was edited for clarity.