PITTSBURGH-The question has been kicking around for 20 years: can cutting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes reduce cigarette use and dependence? “Nicotine is not safe for the developing brain, and we must do everything we can to protect kids from a lifetime of tobacco use and nicotine dependence”.
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Under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, the FDA has the authority to reduce nicotine in cigarettes if it benefits public health.
Tindle said reduced-nicotine cigarettes may be a way to potentially lessen the harm that smokers experience from cigarettes by decreasing the number of cigarettes that they smoke per day or potentially playing a role in quitting smoking altogether.
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from 840 people.
And participants who spent six weeks smoking the cigarettes with the lowest nicotine content were twice as likely to report trying to quit smoking within 30 days after the end of the study.
The FDA could, with the stroke of the pen, require cigarettes sold in the United States to slash their nicotine content. The nicotine can be extracted from tobacco, like the caffeine is from coffee, Donny said.
The study came in response to a call for research put out by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates tobacco products.
An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, bolsters the case for regulating nicotice as path to help quit smoking. Among those who had continued to get their full fix of nicotine, 17 percent – about half as many – reported that they had tried to quit. Among youth who used each of the following tobacco products in the past 30 days (considered current users), 63.3 percent (1.58 million) had used a flavored e-cigarette, 60.6 percent (1.02 million) had used flavored hookah tobacco, 63.5 percent (910,000) had used a flavored cigar, 58.8 percent (690,000) had used flavored smokeless tobacco, and 53.6 percent (900,000) had used menthol cigarettes.
“Smokers got around it by inhaling more deeply and more often”. “Now here comes this simple crisp reasearch therefore indicates if you just reduce the…”
Other factors to be studied are the use of a nicotine patch as an adjunct to smoking cigarettes and how smokers with schizophrenia might respond to a reduction in nicotine.
“This, I think, provides support” for lowering nicotine, said one study leader, Dr. Neal Benowitz of the University of California, San Francisco.
By the sixth week, the study groups showed widely different smoking habits: Those smoking their own brand or the 15.8-milligram cigarettes smoked 22.2 and 21.3 cigarettes per day, respectively.
A few smokers eased their withdrawal symptoms by “cheating” with their usual cigarettes, Donny said.
The idea of marketing cigarettes containing very low nicotine is intriguing to David Tinkelman, Medical Director of Health Initiatives at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado.
“As the authors point out, a longer-term study is now underway”, Altria spokesman Brian May said in a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times.
Sustained efforts to implement proven tobacco control programs and policies are necessary to prevent all forms of tobacco use, including use of flavored tobacco products, among US youth.
But what about “light” cigarettes?
But to crack down on nicotine, the FDA would have to show that doing so would improve public health. Carcinogen exposure fell by about 15 percent with the two lowest-nicotine cigarettes.
Tobacco researcher Michael Fiore was not involved in the study, but wrote a commentary in the journal.
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But the FDA also has to consider whether bringing down the nicotine content in cigarettes would give the public the false impression that cigarettes are safe, Edelman said.
