Few quit smoking permanently

According to a new report, around one-half of people who manage to stop smoking for one year after using nicotine patches eventually start smoking again. The investigators revisited a group of people who had tried to quit smoking eight years prior during a study of the benefits of nicotine replacement therapy.Researchers from the Institute of Health Sciences in Oxford based their findings on follow-up data from 1,686 smokers who had participated in a 1991-1992 study in which they helped investigate how well 12 weeks of nicotine replacement therapy helps people quit. All original participants were between 25 and 64 of age and reported smoking at least 15 cigarettes each day. Half of the participants wore a nicotine patch, which delivers the addictive ingredient in cigarettes continuously through the skin, producing roughly the same steady level of nicotine present in the blood of a smoker. The other half wore an inactive or placebo patch. The researchers found that only 153 or nine percent of all participants, including those using the placebo patch, had quit for at least one year during the original study. Eight years later they re-contacted the same group of people and found that only 83 of the first group of quitters had stayed smoke-free, demonstrating that 46 percent of people who quit smoking for one year will start again within the next few years. They found in their original study that only nine percent of people were able to stop smoking for one year. They also discovered that around one-half had begun lighting up once again during the following eight years. As a result, only five percent of the people who participated in the original study succeeded in quitting for good. These findings reinforce the idea that smoking is a habit that is extremely hard to give up.

Nicotine replacement therapy is helpful in breaking the addiction cycle, but it cannot substitute for all the pleasures associated with smoking. Nicotine replacement therapy, including patches, can help people quit, but some people are more successful than others. For instance, smokers who are older, have social support and are less addicted to cigarettes typically find it easier to stop using nicotine replacement therapy. These results suggest that the most effective quitting techniques may be those that take an individual's needs and personality into account. It needs to be realized that different people will respond differently to different types of therapy. Despite these facts, the results also demonstrate that many people can stop smoking for good, for half of the people who stopped smoking originally had not started again for eight years. It can be assumed that these people have stopped permanently.

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