View clinical trials related to Betel Nut Chewer.
Filter by:The practice of betel quid chewing is known as the top 3 causes of oral cancers in Malaysia. The devastating part among Malaysians are that more than 50% of these cancer patients present at a later stage of this disease necessitating a massive surgical procedure and a costly oncological treatment to remove the tumour and restore the vital structures in the head and neck regions of the patients. In 2010, World Health Organisation recognised that the users of betel quid are having a 'Dependency Syndrome' similar to that of a cigarette smoking. Since then, much research has been focussed upon the 'addictive nature' and the cessation of this ill-health behaviour. Malaysia's current plight is its strikingly high prevalence of betel quid users within its high-risk communities. The other challenge is the widely scattered high-risk communities across the diverse geography, locality, ethnicity, culture and native languages across the country that make cessation not an easy task but an uphill battle. The latest available report in 2011 showed that the females in Sabah and Sarawak's indigenous communities presented with a prevalence of 28.4% being current chewers. This prevalence was way greater than the global prevalence of 10-20% of betel quid chewers reported worldwide. The female predominance among the betel quid users in Malaysia is another matter of concern as studies had claimed that females are less likely to cease chewing habit compared to their male counterparts. Fortunately, in 2015, a feasibility study was conducted to adapt an intensive smoking cessation intervention to cater for betel quid chewers which received a high cessation rate of 65%. Later in 2018, researchers incorporated a saliva test to assess the effectiveness of a group-based intensive betel quid cessation program which also yielded a high cessation rate of 38% among the participants. Since there is no existing betel quid cessation intervention in Malaysia, this study aims to adapt a betel quid cessation program for a high-risk community in Malaysia. This study hypothesised that the intervention group will produce a significantly greater cessation rate compared to the control group at the 3-months follow-up assessment.
Areca nut, also known as betel nut, is the fourth most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world, following only alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine in prevalence of consumption. Although betel nut is chewed by approximately 600 million people globally, its use is concentrated in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and some Pacific Islands. Betel nut has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Despite the global significance and carcinogenicity of betel nut, there has been very little behavioral or psychological research about betel nut chewing, and there has been no systematic research on the topic of betel nut cessation interventions. The current intervention builds directly upon the National Institutes of Health - National Cancer Institute's U54 University of Guam/University of Hawaii Cancer Center Comprehensive Partnership to Advance Health Equity. Previous data collected through the partnership suggest that betel nut chewers, like smokers, generally want and intend to quit, but do not have specific plans of how or when they will quit. In addition, most betel nut chewers in the partnership's previous study already have tried to quit on one or more occasions. The findings suggest that betel nut chewers could benefit from cessation programs modeled after smoking cessation programs. During 2014, partnership investigators conducted a feasibility study of the betel nut cessation program. The program was well received and yielded surprisingly high rates of self-reported betel nut cessation. Specific Aim 1. To test the efficacy of an intensive group-based betel nut cessation program. Specific Aim 2. To quantitatively determine the efficacy of the group-based betel nut cessation intervention trial using bio-verification.