Building the evidence base for effective tobacco control policies: the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project)

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is a seminal event in tobacco control and in global health. Scientific evidence guided the creation of the FCTC, and as the treaty moves into its implementation phase, scientific evidence can be used to guide the formulation of evidence-based tobacco control policies. The International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project) is a transdisciplinary international collaboration of tobacco control researchers who have created research studies to evaluate and understand the psychosocial and behavioural impact of FCTC policies as they are implemented in participating ITC countries, which together are inhabited by over 45% of the world's smokers. This introduction to the ITC Project supplement of Tobacco Control presents a brief outline of the ITC Project, including a summary of key findings to date. The overall conceptual model and methodology of the ITC Project--involving representative national cohort surveys created from a common conceptual model, with common methods and measures across countries--may hold promise as a useful paradigm in efforts to evaluate and understand the impact of population-based interventions in other important domains of health, such as obesity.