Nationally representative Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey data were used to identify which subpopulations of US adults had stopped smoking cigarettes for 6 months or longer in the last year and the methods they used. From 2021 through 2022, 2.9 million adults stopped smoking. Most of these were male, non-Hispanic White, aged less than 55 years, college educated, and identified as straight. The most popular method used was nicotine products (53.9%; 1.5 million adults), especially e-cigarettes in combination with other methods (40.8%; 1.2 million) and e-cigarettes alone (26.0%; 0.7 million). The data suggest that interventions to reduce smoking could focus on subpopulations that stopped smoking the least and encourage use of evidence-based methods.

An early version of this research was presented in poster form at the 2024 Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) annual meeting (https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2yuw4). The authors thank two anonymous reviewers and participants at the 2024 SRNT meeting for helpful comments and suggestions. This work received no financial support. The authors declare the following potential conflicts of interests: F.F. provides consulting services through Pinney Associates on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc, which had no involvement in this article. R.N. has received grant and contractual funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration; served as a paid consultant to the Government of Canada via a contract with Industrial Economics Inc; received an honorarium for a virtual meeting from Pfizer Inc; received other NIDA grants paid to his employers; received salary from the Steven Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at The Legacy Foundation, now Truth Initiative, New York University School of Global Public Health; and communicated with Juul Labs personnel, for which there was no compensation, and received hospitality in the form of meals at some meetings; none of which supported the work reported here.

This study did not receive any funding.

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Yes

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

Only publicly available, de-identified survey data were used; therefore, this study is exempt from NIH human subjects research under NIH exemption 4 and did not require institutional review board review.

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