Kicking the habit

Popular smoking cessation treatments – such as nicotine replacements and antidepressants – improve people’s chances of kicking the habit without much risk, according to a review of past research.

In Bahrain health chiefs have stopped shoppers from smoking in malls, tried getting the habit snubbed out in restaurants and insisted every cigarette packet carries graphic images as a warning of the consequences of lighting up.

“It seems very clear that medications can help. They’re not the magic bullet but you do improve your chances of quitting if you try them. And as far as we can tell, they’re safe to use,” said Kate Cahill, who led the study.

Several reviews have looked at the effectiveness of smoking cessation treatments, but the researchers wanted to put those results into a single large review to help people who want to use medical treatments to stop smoking, said the senior researcher for the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group at the University of Oxford, England.

Previous studies have found between 70 per cent and 75 per cent current smokers want to quit, but only about three per cent accomplish that every year.

For the new study, the researchers pulled data from 12 reviews published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international research organisation that evaluates medical evidence. Those analyses, which were conducted between 2008 and 2012, included data from 267 studies of more than 101,000 smokers.

The studies typically compared smokers trying to quit without the help of a smoking cessation treatment to smokers using nicotine replacement therapies, such as nicotine gum and patches, or prescription drugs.

The medications include varenicline (marketed by Pfizer as Chantix or Champix) and bupropion (marketed by GlaxoSmithKline as Zyban or Wellbutrin, but available as a generic).

The researchers found that the nicotine replacement therapies and the antidepressant bupropion led about 18 people to successfully give up smoking for every 10 people who quit without treatments.

Varenicline performed even better and led to about 28 people quitting for every 10 who did so without medication.

What’s more, they found that lesser-known smoking cessation treatments were also effective. Those include the antidepressant nortriptyline and cytisine, a plant-derived supplement.

All of the treatments also appeared to be reasonably safe, according to the researchers who published their results in The Cochrane Library last week.

Previous reports have found that about one in every 1,000 people taking bupropion had a seizure, but the researchers found a lower rate of one in 1,500.

Also, despite conflicting reports over the safety of varenicline, the researchers didn’t find evidence that the drug increased the risk of neuropsychiatric or heart problems.

Judith Prochaska, who researches tobacco treatment but was not involved in the new study, said not all smokers will use smoking cessation tools but it’s important for them to know they’re available.

“They have been shown to pretty much double the likelihood that somebody will quit,” she added.

Medics have cautioned, however, that smoking cessation tools won’t work for everyone, but ‘they certainly help some people’.