BMC Public Health Research article Attitudes to smoking cessation and triggers to relapse among Chinese male smokers Tingzhong Yang*1, K John Fisher2, Fuzhong Li2 and Brian G Danaher2 BioMed Central Open Access Address: 1Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Zhejiang, 353 Yan'an Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310031, China and 2Oregon Research Institute, Eugene, USA Email: Tingzhong Yang* - Tingzhongyang@sohu.com; K John Fisher - johnf@ori.org; Fuzhong Li - fuzhongl@ori.org; Brian G Danaher - briand@ori.org * Corresponding author Published: 14 March 2006 BMC Public Health2006, 6:65 doi:10.1186/1471-2458-6-65 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/65 Received: 04 November 2005 Accepted: 14 March 2006 © 2006Yang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Smoking is related to many diseases, and the relapse to smoking after cessation in China is noticeable. We examined the attitudes of Chinese male smokers regarding smoking cessation and reasons for relapse. Methods: We interviewed 201 male smokers in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang province, China who had tried to quit smoking at least once in order to identify reasons for quitting and situations triggering relapse. Results: The most significant reported reasons for quitting included personal health (77.1%), the cost of cigarettes (53.7%), and family pressures to quit (29.9%). The most common factors triggering relapse were social situations (34.3%), feeling negative or down (13.4%) and times of being alone (8.4%). Conclusion: Health and family concerns, personal factors, the influence of others and a lack of cessation resources were cited as salient factors concerning smoking cessation among male smokers in this study. Effective smoking control efforts in China will require attention to these influences if China is to curb its current smoking epidemic. Background With an estimated 300 million male smokers and 20 mil- lion female smokers, China has more smokers than any other country worldwide, and as a result smoking related diseases are becoming epidemic [1-4]. A growing number of Chinese studies have confirmed that cigarette smoking is the key behavioural risk factor in the incidence of can- cer, cardiovascular disease, and COPD (Chronic Obstruc- tive Pulmonary Disease) [5-8]. For example, the prevalence of COPD in China is estimated to exceed 3%, or 25 million people, of whom 72% were smokers [7]. Because of China's large population and the substantial contribution smoking makes to mortality, a number of researchers have argued that more effective, broadly applied smoking control strategies in China could prevent at least 50 million deaths [4,9,10]. Although few smoking cessation activities have been car- ried out in China, evidence from the 1996 National Prev- alence Survey indicated a smoking prevalence rate for men of 63%, with about 17% reporting that they wanted to quit [10]. However, few Chinese smokers have ever tried to quit (11.7%), and the efficacy of these attempts is very low, with just over 2% of smokers becoming success- Page 1 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)