That smoking is very harmful for health has supposedly been established in numerous studies. Since the habit of smoking becomes an addiction, it is extremely difficult to give up smoking. But a study claims that tailored cessation therapy could augment an individual’s odds of success. At least this is what a study author, Caryn Lerman, PhD, Mary W. Calkins Professor of Psychiatry and Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania claims.
Over the last numerous years, Lerman and colleagues have discovered that people who metabolize nicotine comparatively in due course gain from nicotine patch therapy as opposed to people who metabolize it swiftly. The fast metabolizers seem to perform better with drug therapy like bupropion (Zyban), as compared with the patch.
Now, in a randomized blinded clinical trial, Lerman’s team discovered that slow metabolizers appear to gain from expanded treatment with the patch. At the conclusion of six months of therapy, slow metabolizers who encompassed six months of therapy seemed to have more than double the odds to be abstinent as were slow metabolizers who only had eight weeks of patch therapy followed by placebo patch for the remainder of the time. Nevertheless, six months post therapy came to an end for everyone, there seemed to be no difference between the treatment groups.
Lerman commented, “Extended therapy helps people stay quit and recover from lapses, but it only works as long as people are on it. Those data lead to the compelling question of whether some smokers should be on nicotine patch therapy for the long term.â€
Lerman mentions that the new data proposes that the guidelines for nicotine replacement therapy ought to be reconsidered so that patients are given therapy longer as compared to the present standard of eight weeks. The team appeared to view no dissimilarity in response to short or extended duration in swift metabolizers.
Lerman’s team is supposedly preparing for a nation-wide randomized trial to examine the efficiency of tailoring treatment, patch versus drug therapy, based on a person’s nicotine metabolism rate.
The study was presented at the American Association of Cancer Research.