Treatment seeking for smoking cessation among young adults.

Young adult smokers (18-24 year olds) do not seek treatment for smoking cessation as often as older smokers. Two commonly hypothesized reasons for this are that younger smokers are not aware of treatments or cannot afford them. The State of Vermont provides free smoking cessation treatment, and most young smokers are aware of this; thus, we tested whether young adult smokers from Vermont would still underutilize treatment via a secondary analysis of the population-based 2005 VT Adult Tobacco Survey. Young adult smokers from Vermont were less likely to have used medication (24% vs. 58%; relative risk = 0.42) or psychosocial (28% vs. 53%; relative risk = 0.54) treatment than middle-aged smokers (25-44 year olds). We conclude that reasons other than awareness and cost cause young adult smokers to not seek treatment.