Background: Most of the efforts to fight against young people's tobacco addiction have focused on smoking prevention and little on smoking cessation. A smoking cessation program, associating pharmacologic and cognitive-behavioural strategy, on a particularly vulnerable population (vocational trainees), was developed by a team of tobacco addiction specialist physicians. We developed a study to evaluate the efficacy of the program. Its main objective is to compare the efficacy of a smoking cessation program offered to all smokers in a population aged 15 to 20 years in Vocational Training Centers (VTC) with that in a control population. The objective of this paper is to present the TABADO study protocol and the results of the pilot study.

Methods: The study is quasi-experimental, prospective, evaluative and comparative and takes place during the 2 years of vocational training. The final population will be composed of 2000 trainees entering a VTC (in Lorraine, France): The intervention group (1000 trainees) benefited from the TABADO program while no specific intervention took place in the "control" group (1000 trainees) other than the treatment and education services usually available. Our primary outcome will be the tobacco abstinence rate at 12 months.

The pilot study is a descriptive monocentric cross-sectional study conducted among the whole group of students, completed by a longitudinal prospective study of smoker volunteers.

Inclusion criteria:

• All students, males and females, registered in the VTC for at least a 2-year training period
• Aged from 15 to 20 years

Exclusion criteria:

• Subjects with current serious psychiatric disorders or who may be susceptible to decompensation upon quitting smoking (major depression)
• Smokers who are involved in an ongoing attempt to quit, with medical monitoring.