Evidence for Everyday Health Choices

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Evidence for Everyday Health Choices (#EEHealthChoices) is a series (launched February 2016) for anyone wanting trustworthy health evidence to help them make choices. This information can be hard to access. We’ll do lots of the work for you, giving you short summaries and letting you know where you can find out more if you want to. This isn’t a new approach for us, but creating a specific series for everyday health choices should make it quicker and easier for you to find what you need. We’ve done the same for nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals, with a series for each.

The core of Evidence for Everyday Health Choices will be blogs and blogshots (images with key information and a link to where you can read more). You can find our blogshots on Twitter and in blogshot archive, where you can download and share them. We’ll include guest blogs and invite people for whom the evidence is relevant to comment on it and share their experiences.

The hashtag

#EEHealthChoices

Blogshots

Blogshots are a way of giving information in an image that can be shared on social media, like infographics. Here's an example:

There is high-certainty evidence that using combination NRT (fast-acting form + patch) rather than a single form of NRT increases the chances of successfully quitting smoking, whether that single form is a patch or a fast-acting version (e.g. gum). Higher-dose nicotine gum works better than lower-dose gum (high-certainty evidence) and higher dose nicotine skin patches probably work better than lower dose patches (moderate-certainty evidence). Starting NRT before quit day is probably better than starting it at the same time as giving up smoking (moderate-certainty evidence). There is only low- and very low-certainty evidence on safety of NRT, which was not looked at in most of the studies. Where studies did look at safety, very few people experienced negative effects of NRT and they were mild effects such as skin irritation from patches. Cochrane Review (published April 2019); 63 studies with 41,509 people (mostly adults) who smoked at least 15 cigarettes a day and wanted to quit. Studies lasted for at least six months and compared the effects of different forms, doses, durations and schedules of NRT for people trying to quit smoking.

Evidently Cochrane blogs

You’ll find Evidently Cochrane blogs for this series in the Evidence for Everyday Health Choices category.

Find out more about Cochrane, Evidence-Based Medicine & the real evidence behind the headlines

Narrated by: Cochrane UK'S Senior Fellow in General Practice, Lynda Ware
Video made by: Stuart Hobbs
Slides by: Lynda Ware and Holly Millward