Trying to quit smoking? Patches, drugs help: study
Trying to stop smoking? Smokers have considerably more success when they use nicotine patches or prescription medications than when they try to go it alone, an international study found.
Past research has yielded conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of such aids since they seem to work in clinical trials, but less so in a real-life setting.
But the current researchers, whose findings appear in the journal Addiction, found that some quitting aids were linked to four-to-six-fold higher success rates.
“Smokers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States are more likely to succeed in quit attempts when they use (drugs) or nicotine patch,” wrote study leader Karin Kasza, a statistician at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, and colleagues.
Kasza and her team surveyed more than 7,400 adult smokers in the United States, the Britain, Canada and Australia on their quit attempts, including whether they even remembered every time they resolved to give up cigarettes.
They then tracked these people to see how many had succeeded in staying smoke-free for at least six months.
About 2,200 people used a prescription medication or nicotine replacement therapy, but the rest did not.
Among those who used no medication to quit, five percent managed to stay smoke-free for six months.
In comparison, 18 percent of nicotine patch users, 15 percent of people who used buproprion - an antidepressant - and 19 percent of people who used a medication called varenicline stayed off cigarettes for six months.
After taking into account factors that could affect people’s success, such as how long and how heavily they had smoked, the researchers determined that buproprion and the nicotine patch were each tied to a four-fold increase in quitting success compared with those who used no medications, and varenicline to a nearly six-fold increase.
Eight percent of people who used oral nicotine replacement products, such as gum, stayed abstinent for six months.
Smoking Facts and Tobacco Statistics
1) There are 1.1 billion smokers in the world today, and if current trends continue, that number is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by the year 2025.
2) China is home to 300 million smokers who consume approximately 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year, or 3 million cigarettes a minute.
3) Worldwide, approximately 10 million cigarettes are purchased a minute, 15 billion are sold each day, and upwards of 5 trillion are produced and used on an annual basis.
4) Five trillion cigarette filters weigh approximately 2 billion pounds.
5) It’s estimated that trillions of filters, filled with toxic chemicals from tobacco smoke, make their way into our environment as discarded waste yearly.
6) While they may look like white cotton, cigarette filters are made of very thin fibers of a plastic called cellulose acetate. A cigarette filter can take between 18 months and 10 years to decompose.
7) A typical manufactured cigarette contains approximately 8 or 9 milligrams of nicotine, while the nicotine content of a cigar is 100 to 200 milligrams, with some as high as 400 milligrams.
8) There is enough nicotine in four or five cigarettes to kill an average adult if ingested whole. Most smokers take in only one or two milligrams of nicotine per cigarette however, with the remainder being burned off.
9) Ambergris, otherwise known as whale vomit is one of the hundreds of possible additives used in manufactured cigarettes.
10) Benzene is a known cause of acute myeloid leukemia, and cigarette smoke is a major source of benzene exposure. Among U.S. smokers, 90 percent of benzene exposures come from cigarettes.
11) Radioactive lead and polonium are both present in low levels in cigarette smoke.
12) Hydrogen cyanide, one of the toxic byproducts present in cigarette smoke, was used as a genocidal chemical agent during World War II.
13) Secondhand smoke contains more than 50 cancer-causing chemical compounds, 11 of which are known to be Group 1 carcinogens.
14) The smoke from a smoldering cigarette often contains higher concentrations of the toxins found in cigarette smoke than exhaled smoke does.
15) Kids are still picking up smoking at the alarming rate of 3,000 a day in the U.S., and 80,000 to 100,000 a day worldwide.
16) Worldwide, one in five teens age 13 to 15 smoke cigarettes.
17) Approximately one quarter of the youth alive in the Western Pacific Region (East Asia and the Pacific) today will die from tobacco use.
18) Half of all long-term smokers will die a tobacco-related death.
19) Every eight seconds, a human life is lost to tobacco use somewhere in the world. That translates to approximately 5 million deaths annually.
20) Tobacco use is expected to claim one billion lives this century unless serious anti-smoking efforts are made on a global level.
Tobacco offers us a life of slavery, a host of chronic, debilitating illnesses and ultimately death. And think about it: We pay big bucks for those “benefits.” Sad, but true.
Overall, the researchers found, people who tried to quit without any aids were likely to be younger, have lower incomes, be less addicted to nicotine and have higher confidence in their ability to break the smoking habit than those who used aids.