July 2 (HealthDay News) -- Promotion of a smoking cessation hotline in the wake of news of anchor Peter Jennings' death more than tripled the number of calls to the hotline, a new study found.

According to Erik Augustson, a behavioral scientist with the National Cancer Institute's Tobacco Control Research Branch, smoking cessation hotlines can be extremely successful, in some cases doubling or tripling quit rates.

In November 2005, ABC News promoted the national 1-800-QUIT-NOW phone number during a series of World News Tonight stories called "Quit to Live: Fighting Lung Cancer." The study, which is in the July/August issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, examined the response to the promotion.

The hotline links callers to state counselors who give them recommendations about how to quit smoking. The counselors give advice instead of simply referring callers to resources, Augustson said.

"We know that these things work. We know that in general, when people call and participate, the customer satisfaction tends to be very high," he said. "You really talk to a person who talks to you about what's going on (in your life), but very few people use these services."

Before the promotion, in October 2005, the number of calls to the hotline was 9,723. In November 2005, the number jumped to 29,942. Calls fell to 8,966 in December.

The next step is to find more effective ways to promote smoking-cessation hotlines, Augustson said. Putting the phone number on cigarette packs is one idea.

"The flip side of this is that if we increase the traffic to quit lines, we also need to be able to staff them so we can handle that increased traffic," he said. "That represents a significant challenge. These are state-level programs, and state-level funding can wax and wane."

These findings are not surprising, according to Lirio Covey, director of the Smoking Cessation Program at Columbia University Medical Center. It would be more valuable to know what happened to callers in the long term, she said.

But Covey said that promotion of smoking cessation programs is important. "Smoking is so easy to do and stopping so difficult, thus cessation messages can be easy to ignore. The more they are promoted, the more resistance can be addressed."

SOURCE: Health Behavior News Service, news release, June 29, 2007