Nicotine Gum and Patch Don't Help Smokers Quit... - Anne Bouey

"If you’re a smoker trying to quit, the good news is that there are a number of things that can help you kick the habit. The bad news is that they may not work long term. A new study confirms what many smokers already know — that quitting is really really hard, and even the latest smoking cessation strategies like gums and patches can’t curb the nicotine craving for very long. Researchers report in the journal Tobacco Control that nicotine gum and nicotine patches designed to help smokers quit aren’t any more effective than going cold turkey when it comes to keeping smokers off cigarettes for longer than a few months. Beyond that, their ability to curb the need for cigarettes isn’t as clear. “We were disappointed,” says Gregory Connolly, director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the paper. “We didn’t get the results we hoped we would get.” Connolly and his colleagues studied 787 adult smokers in Massachusetts who had recently quit smoking. They were followed between 2001 and 2006, and answered questionnaires at three different times about whether they had started smoking again. At each of the three survey periods, one third of the participants had relapsed, and they were relatively evenly distributed among those who had used nicotine replacement, those who combined nicotine replacement with counseling, and those who didn’t use nicotine replacement strategies at all. (The trial did not include many participants using the most recently approved pill-based nicotine replacement drug varenicline (Chantix), since it only became available in 2006. But other studies have shown that varenicline may not be an effective first line drug for smoking cessation.) “The findings say that we are pretty good at getting people to quit, but not great at getting people to stay quit,” says Connolly. Granted, nicotine replacement therapies aren’t smoking cessation drugs per se — they’re treatments that provide small amounts of... more... - Anne Bouey from Bookmarklet