According to an American study, the speed with which a smoker eliminates nicotine from their body could help determine the best treatment for stopping smoking.
Do you want to optimize your chances of quitting smoking? To do this, you will need to know how quickly your body eliminates nicotine. These are indeed the conclusions of an American study published this Monday in the scientific journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
A study of 1,246 smokers
To reach this conclusion, Prof. Caryn Lerman (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) and colleagues conducted a study of 1,246 smokers who wanted to quit. This included about as many poor metabolizers as normal. To understand, nicotine levels drop more quickly in so-called “normal” metabolizers (60% of smokers) who are, therefore, likely to smoke more and find it more difficult to quit.
During this work, the participants were divided by lot into three groups: the first treated with nicotine patches and a placebo pill, the second with the drug varenicline (Champix or Chantix from Pfizer) plus placebo patches, and the last was completely on placebo (pills and patches).
Adapt treatments to each smoker
And the results reported by these scientists are astonishing. At the end of treatment (11 weeks), almost twice as many “normal” metabolizers who had taken varenicline were not smoking than those using the nicotine patch. They also had a better chance of still abstaining from smoking six months later.
On the other hand, varenicline had the same effectiveness as the nicotine patches in “slow” metabolizers, but overall they reported more unwanted side effects with the drug Champix.
Important precision, to distinguish those which eliminate nicotine more or less quickly, and compare the chances of success of the products tested, the authors specify that they used “a biomarker of the rate of elimination of nicotine which reflects the activity of a liver enzyme, CYP2A6. “
A blood test to assess the metabolism of nicotine
According to the authors of this work, “tailoring treatment to the rate at which smokers metabolize nicotine may be a viable clinical strategy to help individual smokers choose which method of quitting will work best for them.” ”
“These results should lead to the development of a simple blood test to assess the metabolism of nicotine so that doctors can better advise patients,” they add. They specify as such that currently “the majority (65%) of smokers who try to quit relapse in the first week. “
As a reminder, tobacco kills nearly 6 million people each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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