Objective: Although prevalence of tobacco smoking is different in the Latin American regions, the consequences on health are similar.
Material and methods: Therefore, guidelines on treatment are needed and ideally speaking must be useful in the different countries. In order to make quick recommendations useful in the region we made a search in PubMed from the last 5 years with the titles "Smoking cessation guidelines" and "Smoking cessation treatment meta-analysis" to know the content of different guidelines and with the titles of "Nicotine replacement therapy", "Nicotine chewing gum", "Nicotine patches", "Nicotine inhaler", "Bupropion therapy", "Varenicline therapy" and "Individual and group behavioural counselling for smoking cessation" to determine the efficacy of each intervention.
Results and conclusion: Our recommendation based on the availability of pharmacotherapy and human resources is that medical advice and behavioural group counseling must be primary interventions either adding, or not, first line drugs for smoking cessation.