New smoking cessation therapy proves promising... assuming you still want your nicotine addiction

A novel technology for delivering nicotine to the lungs may soon give smokers a new way to kick the habit. When compared to the nicotine vapor delivery system used in the Nicotrol/Nicorette inhaler, the new technology proved more effective at delivering nicotine to the blood stream.

"We wanted to replicate the experience of smoking without incurring the dangers associated with cigarettes, and we wanted to do so more effectively than the nicotine replacement therapies currently on the market," said Jed Rose, Ph.D., director of the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research where the technology is being developed.

The Nicotrol inhaler is a smoking cessation therapy that delivers nicotine vapor to the mouth and upper airways, but little of it reaches the lungs. Duke's new technology combines the vapor phase of pyruvic acid, which occurs naturally in the body, and nicotine. [ScienceCodex]

All fascinating, but why so much research to keep people addicted to nicotine? As I have said many times, the stop smoking propaganda seems designed to make people's addiction more socially acceptable - and keep the profits rolling - rather than curing the nicotine addiction.

Study reveals a need to evaluate and regulate 'electronic cigarettes'

Electronic cigarettes should be evaluated, regulated, labeled and packaged in a manner consistent with cartridge content and product effect – even if that effect is a total failure to deliver nicotine as demonstrated in a study supported by the National Cancer Institute and led by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher. The research was published in the Online First issue of the journal Tobacco Control. The article will appear in the February print issue of the journal.

Electronic cigarettes consist of a battery, heater and cartridge containing a solution of nicotine, propylene glycol and other chemicals and have been marketed to deliver nicotine without tobacco toxicants. Despite no published data concerning safety or efficacy, these products are sold in shopping malls and online. Further, "electronic cigarettes" currently are unregulated in the U.S., unlike other products intended to deliver nicotine to smokers such as lozenges, gum and patches.

"Consumers have a right to expect that products marketed to deliver a drug will work safely and as promised. Our findings demonstrate that the 'electronic cigarettes' that we tested do not deliver the drug they are supposed to deliver. It's not just that they delivered less nicotine than a cigarette. Rather, they delivered no measurable nicotine at all. In terms of nicotine delivery, these products were as effective as puffing from an unlit cigarette," said principal investigator Thomas Eissenberg, Ph.D., professor in the VCU Department of Psychology.

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Perhaps the good preofessor forgot to put a cartridge in his e-cigarette! Yes, e-cigs need regulating as they deliver a drug, and yes, this is a ploy by tobacco and pharmaceuticals to barge out of their profitable market an upstart product. They should bring out their own e-cigarettes but, for big tobacco, it would ruin their market and, for big pharma, it would expose the lie that NRT are some kind of medicine rather than just another profitable delivery system of a drug that is otherwise classed a poison. Go figure.

Nicotine replacement therapy is over-promoted since most ex-smokers quit unassisted

Health authorities should emphasize the positive message that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, despite the promotion of cessation drugs by pharmaceutical companies and many tobacco control advocates.The dominant messages about smoking cessation contained in most tobacco control campaigns, which emphasize that serious attempts at quitting smoking must be pharmacologically or professionally mediated, are critiqued in an essay in this week's PLoS Medicine by Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Australia. This overemphasis on quit methods like nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has led to the "medicalisation of smoking cessation," despite good evidence that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is quitting "cold turkey" or reducing-then-quitting. Reviewing 511 studies published in 2007 and 2008 the authors report that studies repeatedly show that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided and most ex-smokers report that cessation was less difficult than expected. The medicalisation of smoking cessation is fuelled by the extent and influence of pharmaceutical support for cessation intervention studies, say the authors. They cite a recent review of randomized controlled trials of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) that found that 51% of industry-funded trials reported significant cessation effects, while only 22% of non-industry trials did. Many assisted cessation studies—but few if any unassisted cessation studies—involve researchers who declare support from a pharmaceutical company manufacturing cessation products.


The authors conclude that "public sector communicators should be encouraged to redress the overwhelming dominance of assisted cessation in public awareness, so that some balance can restored in smokers' minds regarding the contribution that assisted and unassisted smoking cessation approaches can make to helping them quit smoking."

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Absolutely spot-on, but as we know, so-called NRT is just a way for the nicotine industry to make more money, and that nicotine industry now includes pharmaceuticals as well as tobacco companies.

Big Tobacco Claims that Smoking Reduces Risk of Alzheimer's is a Scam

Good to see that even if journalists can't be bothered to investigate the links between tobacco companies and so-called scientific research, then at least some scientists are doing so. This study, published in January in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, is a meta-analysis of previous studies looking at the effects of smoking on the incidence of Alzheimer's disease. Big tobacco have made much of claims that smoking actually reduces the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's. So how much truth is there to this?

The University of California at San Francisco team reviewed 43 published studies from 1984 to 2007. Authors of a quarter of the studies had an affiliation with the tobacco industry. The UCSF team determined that the average risk of a smoker developing AD, based on studies without tobacco industry affiliation, was estimated to be 1.72, meaning that smoking nearly doubled the risk of AD. In contrast, the team found that studies authored by individuals with tobacco industry affiliations, showed a risk factor of 0.86, suggesting that smoking protects against AD. When all studies were considered together, the risk factor for developing AD from smoking was essentially neutral at a statistically insignificant 1.05.

Thus the tobacco-affiliated scientists came up with a risk factor of half the figure found by more independent studies. Shocked? This has been the standard practice of tobacco companies ever since the link was made with lung cancer: pay scientists to falsify results. Any scientific research that has financial consequences runs the risk of being tainted by vested interests. But joining the dots and finding the pattern takes time and research funding. One interesting thing is that the researchers discovered which scientists had links to tobacco companies after the publication of company documents that had previously been kept secret.

“We know that industry-sponsored research is more likely to reach conclusions favorable to the sponsor,” said Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, of the UCSF Department of Medicine and a study co-author. “Our findings point to the ongoing corrosive nature of tobacco industry funding and point to the need for academic institutions to decline tobacco industry funding to protect the research process.”

Smokers at risk from their own 'second-hand' smoke

It is well known that smokers damage their health by directly inhaling cigarette smoke. Now, research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health has shown that they are at additional risk from breathing environmental tobacco smoke, contrary to the prevailing assumption that such risks would be negligible in comparison to those incurred by actually smoking. Maria Teresa Piccardo worked with a team of researchers from the National cancer Research Institute, Genoa, Italy, to study the exposure of newsagents in the city to harmful cigarette smoke. She said, "Newsagents were chosen because they work alone in small newsstands, meaning that any tobacco smoke in the air they breathe is strictly correlated to the number of cigarettes smoked by that newsagent. We studied the contribution environmental tobacco smoke made to carcinogen exposure in 15 active smokers."

The researchers found that environmental tobacco smoke may have a significant impact on smokers' health. For someone who smokes 14 cigarettes a day, their own second hand smoke resulted in exposure the equivalent of smoking an extra 2.6 cigarettes. According to Piccardo, "Both active and passive smoking contributions should always be considered in studies about health of active smokers."
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Slightly bizarre piece of research. In Italy, newsstands are large cubicles with the vendor hiding inside, hence the idea that they would be breathing in their own second-hand smoke. It doesn't take a genius to figure that if second-hand smoke has a measurable effect then it would also have one on the first-hand smoker. I guess it never occurred to the researchers that these people were also inhaling second-hand exhaust fumes.

If your first cigarette gave you a buzz and you now smoke, blame a gene

Anyone who has ever tried smoking probably remembers that first cigarette vividly. For some, it brought a wave of nausea or a nasty coughing fit. For others, those first puffs also came with a rush of pleasure or "buzz." Now, a new study links those first experiences with smoking, and the likelihood that a person is currently a smoker, to a particular genetic variation. The finding may help explain the path that leads from that first cigarette to lifelong smoking.

The new finding also adds to growing suspicion surrounding the role of a particular nicotine-receptor gene in smoking-related behaviors and in lung cancer. The regular smokers in the study were far more likely than the never-smokers to have the less common rs16969968 form of the CHRNA5 gene, in which just one base-pair in the gene sequence was different from the more common form. This kind of genetic variation is called a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP.

Smokers were also eight times as likely to report that their first cigarettes gave them a pleasurable buzz.

"It appears that for people who have a certain genetic makeup, the initial physical reaction to smoking can play a significant role in determining what happens next," says senior author and project leader, Ovide Pomerleau, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School and founder of the U-M Nicotine Research Laboratory.

"If cigarette smoking is sustained, nicotine addiction can occur in a few days to a few months," he adds. "The finding of a genetic association with pleasurable early smoking experiences may help explain how people get addicted — and, of course, once addicted, many will keep smoking for the rest of their lives."