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Systematic Review
"To assess the effect of incentives on preventing children and adolescents (aged 5 to 18 years) from starting to smoke. It was also our intention to assess, where possible, the dose‐response of incentives, the costs of incentive programmes, whether incentives are more or less effective in combination with other interventions to prevent smoking initiation, and any unintended consequences arising from the use of incentives."
"We identified three eligible RCTs and five CTs, including participants aged 11 to 14 years, who were non‐smokers at baseline. Of the eight trials identified, six had analyzable data relevant for this review, which contributed to meta‐analyses (7275 participants in total: 4003 intervention; 3272 control; 2484 participants after adjusting for clustering). All except one of the studies tested the 'Smokefree Class Competition' (SFC), which has been widely implemented throughout Europe. In this competition, classes with youth generally between the ages of 11 and 14 years commit to being smoke‐free for a six‐month period, and report their smoking status regularly. If 90% or more of the class are non‐smokers at the end of the six months, the class goes into a competition to win prizes. The one study that was not a trial of the SFC was a controlled trial in which schools in two communities were assigned to the intervention, with schools in a third community acting as controls. Students in the intervention community with lower smoking rates at the end of the project (one school year) received rewards. Most studies resulted in statistically non‐significant results. Only one study of the SFC reported a significant effect of the competition on the prevention of smoking at the longest follow‐up. However, this study was at risk of multiple biases, and when we calculated the adjusted risk ratio (RR) we no longer detected a statistically significant difference. The pooled RR for the more robust RCTs (3 studies, n = 3056 participants/1107 adjusted for clustering) suggests that there is no statistically significant effect of incentives, in the form of the SFC, to prevent smoking initiation among children and adolescents in the long term (RR 1.00, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.19). Pooled results from the non‐randomized trials also did not detect a significant effect of the SFC, and we were unable to extract data on our outcome of interest from the one trial that did not study the SFC. There is little robust evidence to suggest that unintended consequences (such as making false claims about their smoking status and bullying of smoking students) are consistently associated with such interventions, although this has not been the focus of much research. There was insufficient information to assess the dose‐response relationship or to report costs of incentives for preventing smoking uptake. We judged the included RCTs to be at unclear risk of bias, and the non‐RCTs to be at high risk of bias. Using GRADE, we rated the overall quality of the evidence for our primary outcome as 'low' (for RCTs) and 'very low' (for non‐RCTs), because of imprecision (all studies had wide confidence intervals), and for the risks of bias identified. We further downgraded the non‐RCT evidence, due to issues with the non‐RCT study design, likely to introduce further bias."
"The very limited evidence currently available suggests that incentive programmes do not prevent smoking initiation among youth. However, there are relatively few published studies and these are of variable quality. In addition, trials included in the meta‐analyses were all studies of the SFC, which distributed small to moderately‐sized prizes to whole classes, usually through a lottery system. It is therefore possible that other incentive programmes could be more successful at preventing smoking uptake in young people. Future studies might investigate the efficacy of a wider range of incentives, including those given to individual participants to prevent smoking uptake, whilst considering both the effect of incentives on smoking initiation and the progression to smoking. It would be useful if incentives were evaluated in varying populations from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and if intervention components were described in detail."