SELAH, Wash. -- The results are in, thanks to students in Selah High School’s Class of 2004 who participated in the Hutchinson Study of High School Smoking.

According to a pair of scientific articles in today’s online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center secured landmark results in a statewide study of teen smoking cessation.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health and believed to be the largest randomized trial of teen smoking cessation ever conducted, the study involved more than 2,000 teenage smokers from 50 high schools in Washington, including Selah High School.

Researchers in the center’s Cancer Prevention Program found that personalized, confidential telephone counseling sessions are effective in helping teen smokers quit smoking, according to a Hutchinson center news release disseminated by the Selah School District.

Half of the schools in the trial — including Selah High School — were randomly assigned experimental intervention. At these schools, members of the Class of 2004 who smoked were asked to take part in telephone counseling designed to help motivate them to quit.

The other schools served as the control, or comparison, group. Teen smokers from those schools didn’t participate in the telephone intervention.

At the end of the study, 21.8 percent of all smokers in the experimental intervention group had accomplished continuous smoking cessation for six months, compared to 17.8 percent of those in the control group, a difference of 4 percent.

The articles can be found at http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org.

-- Adriana Janovich