The human dry dock, a Japanese system of detailed health check-ups for middle-aged and elderly people was originally set up for the purpose of secondary prevention, but it is now expected to increasingly play a role in primary prevention. A series of our studies of smoking cessation in the human dry dock setting showed that the abstinence rate increased from 5-6% for non-advised smokers to 9-10% for those who were advised. Thoracic CT screening participants were found to be more likely to quit smoking. It can be estimated that an additional seventy thousand male smokers would quit smoking every year if advice on smoking cessation was routinely given in every dock in Japan.
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