Cytisinicline, a herbal treatment, would be effective in quitting smoking.
- Cytisinicline is a herbal medicine.
- A recent study shows that it is effective in helping to quit smoking.
- Unlike other quit smoking medications, it does not cause significant side effects.
Eight million people die from tobacco each year, according to theWorld Health Organization. This is the main “preventable cause” deaths worldwide. “But no new smoking cessation drugs have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for nearly two decades.”, recalls Nancy Rigotti, director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. A future drug could be soon: with a research team, she is working on a withdrawal treatment, which has proven itself in a large-scale clinical trial. The results of this work are published in JAMA.
Quitting smoking: what is cytisinicline?
“There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat smoking, as existing products do not help all smokers quit and may have unacceptable side effects.” explains Nancy Rigotti. However, cytisinicline, the product on which she works, is very well tolerated according to the first tests carried out. This drug is a “natural plant-based alkaloid that selectively binds to nicotinic receptors in the brain that regulate nicotine addiction, alleviating the urge to smoke and reducing the severity of nicotine withdrawal symptoms”say the authors of the study.
Smoking: an effective treatment in twelve weeks
For this phase 3 clinical trial, the scientist and her team recruited 810 adults, all of whom smoked daily and wanted to quit. Two treatment durations were compared: six and twelve weeks, in each case another trial with a placebo was carried out. “The primary endpoint was continuous smoking abstinence, confirmed biochemically during the last four weeks of treatment., say the authors. In the group that took cytisinicline for twelve weeks, 32.6% of participants were abstinent at the end of the study, compared to 7% of those who took the placebo. For the six-week group, abstinence was 25.3% for cytisinicline versus 4.4% for placebo for the final weeks. “Participants taking cytisinicline also experienced a rapid and sustained decline in cravings within the first six weeks of treatment.”note the authors.
Long-term smoking cessation
In the longer term, the trial demonstrated an increase”statistically significant” abstinence and continuously for six months, regardless of the duration of treatment. From the ninth week of the study through week 24, 21.1% of participants in the group that took the drug for twelve weeks had quit smoking, compared to 4.8% for the placebo. In the six-week group, abstinence during weeks 3 to 24 was 8.9% for cytisinicline versus 2.6% for placebo. “Cytisinicline has demonstrated impressive results as a smoking cessation drug in a rigorous clinical trial, which used a new science-based dosing regimen, as well as a longer treatment duration than traditionally practiced.concludes Nancy Rigotti. This product has the potential to help countless people quit smoking and in the process reduce the enormous number of premature deaths and disabilities due to smoking in the United States and around the world..”