The Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group’s 20th anniversary priority setting project report.

The Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group (TAG) conducts and facilitates systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the research evidence for tobacco cessation and prevention interventions. The group was founded in 1996 and in 2016 they conducted a stakeholder engagement project to celebrate the 20th anniversary of TAG and to identify future research priorities for the group and the wider tobacco control community.

 

A summary of the findings of the CTAG taps project:

 

The objective of the project was to:

• Raise awareness of Cochrane TAG and what has been achieved so far.
• Identify areas where further research is needed in the areas of tobacco control and smoking cessation.
• Identify specific goals for Cochrane TAG
• To explore novel ways to disseminate the findings of tobacco research, and Cochrane TAG’s findings.

The survey and workshop resulted in 183 unanswered research questions in the areas of tobacco, quitting smoking and eight priority research areas, including:

• ‘addressing inequalities’
• ‘treatment delivery’
• electronic cigarettes’
• ‘initiating quit attempts’
• ‘young people’
• ‘mental health and substance abuse’
• ‘population-level interventions’
• ‘pregnancy’

Stakeholders who attended the workshop also discussed ways that the public health community and Cochrane TAG could act to move the field of tobacco control forward.

Through this report, Cochrane TAG want to share the identified unanswered questions with the wider tobacco research community to help them to decide the most important research to focus on in the future, and to decide the most important things to work on for Cochrane TAG.

This will involve updating existing reviews, beginning reviews on new topics, and looking in more detail at Cochrane TAG’s research methods.

Contrary to popular belief there are still many important unanswered questions in the field of tobacco control. In addition, it has been noted that many of the results of tobacco control questions are not always reaching their intended targets. Tobacco control stakeholders provide a rich source of information on how these uncertainties should be prioritised; by using this resource the likelihood that the findings of research are useful and will be implemented is much greater. The project was carried out with the hope that researchers and research funders will be able to use the priorities identified to inform their future practice, in the same way that Cochrane TAG are using them to inform new review topics, updates of reviews and methods development.

Cochrane TAG’s findings and implementation suggestions should be considered alongside the existing evidence base and clinical expertise.

 

Here is the full report of the CTAG taps project!

 

You can open the report and the appendices by clicking on the covers below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discussing the future of tobacco addiction research with the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group:

The CTAG taps project ran from January-December 2016. Activities carried out from April 2016-December 2016 were funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research (SPCR)