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Physicians routinely counsel patients against smoking after hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction (MI). However, as many as 70% of patients who smoked previously continue to smoke after hospital discharge.
In this study, researchers constructed a model to estimate health and economic outcomes for more than 300,000 hypothetical smokers hospitalized with MI. Usual care (consisting of standard counseling and printed materials) was compared with usual care plus follow-up (consisting of a behavioral counseling session before discharge, a DVD, and follow-up telephone calls for 3 months after discharge). They estimated that annual mortality would be 5.7% for patients who continued to smoke and 3.4% for those who stopped.
Total medical expe…