Tackling the tobacco challenge

Tobacco use is one of the main risk factors for oral diseases and poses major challenges to international health. All health professionals, therefore, have an important role to play in helping to stop the global tobacco epidemic.

The FDI Tobacco Cessation project was launched in 2020 to provide oral health professionals with smoking cessation and control resources that can be implemented in the dental setting in collaboration with other relevant health professionals.

Implementing brief tobacco interventions

In developed countries, more than 60 per cent of tobacco users see an oral health professional on an annual basis¹. Therefore, the dental profession can reach large numbers of tobacco users and have considerable potential to help users to quit.

Available evidence suggests that behavioural counselling (typically brief) conducted by oral health professionals in conjunction with an oral examination in the dental office or community setting can increase tobacco abstinence rates by 70 per cent³.

Launching new resources to help your patients to quit

• Tobacco cessation guidance outlining how to deliver advice in three-to-five minutes to patients in a primary care setting, to help tobacco users make a quit attempt.
   
• Two video animations illustrating how to deliver three-to-five-minute, brief tobacco interventions to dental patients in primary care by using the 5As and 5Rs models.
   
• Fact sheet on “The effects of E-cigarettes on oral health”, which outlines why oral health professionals should not recommend e-cigarettes for smoking cessation but inform patients about their potential risks.
   
• Watch the webinar entitled “Tobacco Cessation in the dental practice” and earn CE credits: