posted February 06, 2006 04:03 AM         

For a while you may need to put something else in your mouth, that's ok...put anything in your mouth, anything !! But not a smoke!

posted February 06, 2006 05:04 AM         

Cheering you on.......

posted February 06, 2006 12:52 PM         

I planned it out, and so I am trying cold turkey.
so far so.....*blech*

No, I'm not explosive in the least.
I do have some patches, in case it is overwhelming to me. ( or anyone around me)
When i quit before, i'd keep 'emergency' cigarettes around... when lo and behold, I'd smoke them...... I don't want to do that this time...
I had stashed one ( what am I, a hoarding squirrel???) then realized if it was there, and I knew it was there, I'd smoke it, and not free myself from the power of addiction. So I smoked it with great ceremony, and no sadness. And now there are NONE. I want it that way.

posted February 06, 2006 01:11 PM         

There's so much that can be written in response. I found an article for you. I remember reading about this years ago when I was still a smoker myself.

Nicotine as therapy

THERE'S A CHEAP, COMMON, and mostly safe drug, in daily use for centuries by hundreds of millions of people, that only lately has been investigated for its therapeutic potential for a long list of common ills.

The list includes Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and even pain and obesity. Why has interest in this potential cure-all been slow to develop? One reason: in its current forms the drug offers pharmaceutical companies no possibility of substantial profit. Another, perhaps more important: the drug is reviled as the world's most addictive. The drug, of course, is nicotine.

Nicotine is an alkaloid in the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum, which was smoked or chewed in the Americas for thousands of years before European invaders also succumbed to its pleasures and shipped it back to the Old World. Nicotine has always been regarded as medicinal and enjoyable at its usual low doses. Native Americans chewed tobacco to treat intestinal symptoms, and in 1560, Jean Nicot de Villemain sent tobacco seeds to the French court, claiming tobacco had medicinal properties and describing it as a panacea for many ailments. Higher doses are toxic, even lethal-which is why nicotine is used around the world as an insecticide. Yet few of the horrendous health effects of smoking are traceable to nicotine itself-cigarettes contain nearly 4,000 other compounds that play a role. Until recently, nicotine research has been driven primarily by nicotine's unparalleled power to keep people smoking, rather than its potential therapeutic uses.

Nicotine locks on to one group of receptors that are normally targeted by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) are ion channels threaded through cell membranes. When activated, either by acetylcholine or by nicotine, they allow selected ions to flow across the cell membrane.

It is now conventional wisdom that acetylcholine and nicotine act at these receptors to alter electrochemical properties at a variety of synapses, which can in turn affect the release of several other neurotransmitters. This wisdom exists thanks in part to work by Lorna Role and her colleagues at Columbia University in New York City. "In 1995, we turned people's attention to how nicotine works as a modulator, tuning synapses and increasing the gain on transmitter release," Role recalls. Although all nAChRs are activated by nicotine, other drugs could be found or designed that affect only a subset of these receptor types. "If you can dissect out the important players with respect to which nicotine receptors are tuning [a] particular set of synapses, then that provides another way to potentially target the therapeutics."

People with depressive-spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, and adult ADHD tend to smoke heavily, which suggested to researchers that nicotine may soothe their symptoms. Common to all these disorders is a failure of attention, an inability to concentrate on particular stimuli and screen out the rest. Nicotine helps. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have shown that nicotine activates specific brain areas during tasks that demand attention. This may be because of its effects, shared with many other addictive drugs, on the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

"Schizophrenia is a disorder largely of the dopamine system," says John Dani of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dopamine signals in the brain occur in two modes-a kind of background trickle, punctuated by brief bursts. "It's thought that schizophrenics have a hard time separating that background information from important bursts. We've shown that nicotine helps to normalize that signaling by depressing the background but letting the bursts through well," he says. "I'll be surprised if there's not a co-therapy [to help schizophrenics] that takes advantage of nicotine systems in less than a decade."

Smokers also have lower rates of neurodegenerative disorders, and nicotine improves cognitive and motor functioning in people with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. The prevailing hypothesis is that nicotine increases release of neurotransmitters depleted in those diseases. Dani and his colleagues have recently shown that acetylcholinesterase inhibitors-which block the degradation of acetylcholine and hence prolong its action-used to treat Alzheimer's, also stimulate dopamine release. They suspect that malfunctioning of the dopamine system may be affecting noncognitive aspects of dementia such as depressed mood, and that this might be alleviated by nicotine.

Paul Newhouse and his colleagues at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, are studying nicotine drugs as potential therapeutic agents for cognitive dysfunction. Newhouse, a long-time nicotine researcher, is heading the first study ever to examine the efficacy and safety of nicotine patches for treating mild cognitive impairment, thought to be a precursor of Alzheimer's disease. The researchers hope to see a positive effect on attention and learning. Newhouse also heads two studies of nicotinic stimulation in ADHD, using the patch, nicotine blockers, and some novel drugs that activate nicotine receptors.

Nicotine's salutary effects in patients with neurodegenerative and mental disorders have been studied a lot and are fairly well known. Two much newer topics of academic research are nicotine's potential for pain relief and for treating obesity. Nicotine itself has provided modest pain relief in animal studies. Although the analgesic effect of drugs that mimic acetylcholine were originally attributed to a different class of receptors, it is now clear that nAChRs play an important role in the control of pain. For instance, epibatidine, a drug that is extracted from the skin of an Ecuadorian frog and that acts at nAChRs, has been shown to be 200 times more potent than morphine at blocking pain in animals. Current animal research is aimed at discovering just where, how, and which classes of nAChRs work against pain, with the aim of developing more selective drugs.

Meanwhile, nicotine is also being investigated as an analgesic in humans. For example, Pamela Flood, an anesthesiologist at Columbia, is investigating nicotine's future as a postoperative analgesic. She recently completed a pilot study of 20 women undergoing gynecological surgery. All the women had access to unlimited morphine and also got either a single 3-mg dose of nicotine nasal spray or a placebo. The placebo group had peak pain scores of eight out of a possible ten in the first hour after surgery. Women who got nicotine averaged a pain score of five. Despite the small sample size, Flood says, the results were highly significant. "As far as I know this is the first clinical study to use nicotine for analgesia, and it was much more successful than I ever would have imagined."

Nicotine may be the most effective drug around for weight control. As ex-smokers know, to their rue, one of the worst things about quitting cigarettes is putting on pounds-as much as 10 percent of body weight. "Something about being addicted to nicotine and then going off it causes massive increase in weight," Role points out.

Young-Hwan Jo in Role's lab is looking at a particular brain circuit involved in motivational behaviour, especially feeding behaviour. It is lodged primarily in the lateral hypothalamus but has projections all over the cortex, especially the nucleus accumbens, which is the centre of reinforcement. "This is where information that has come in to the thalamus and the hypothalamus is relayed to cortical areas with some sense of salience or remembrance. It presumably is involved in changing perception and motivation for eating. It's not, ‘I have to eat this,' it's, ‘I want to eat this,' " says Role.

Jo has been comparing the synaptic effects of nicotine, which reduces appetite, to those of cannabinoids, which stimulate it. "Control of these projection neurons seems to be oppositely regulated by these two," Role notes. "It doesn't necessarily mean we've found the root of the munchies, but it at least points to pathways that these things have in common."

Dani predicts that weight control is likely to be one of the earliest nicotine-based therapies. "There's a very good chance that the first drug is unlikely to be … nicotine itself, but will take advantage of nicotinic receptors in the therapy," he says. "I know there are drugs now being tested by drug companies just for that purpose."

"It's a little early to call whether nicotine will be used itself as a therapeutic agent or whether these more specific drugs that are being produced or maybe even used in combination with other drugs may be the most important way to go," adds Dani. But he doesn't see the medicinal use of plain nicotine as very likely. Dani points out that the body's own agent, acetylcholine, acts over milliseconds to activate nicotinic receptors, whereas nicotine itself stimulates these receptors for hours.

Yet much of the work to date showing nicotine's effectiveness on a huge range of disorders has involved products available at any drugstore and intended to help people quit smoking.

The forms that nicotinic therapies take is a question for the next decade of research. "We've made an enormous amount of progress on understanding the biology of these receptor systems and how to target them. What has been trickier has been to develop an appropriate pharmacology that allows one to selectively target agents for particular therapeutic purposes with an adequate safety index," Newhouse says. "But some of the drugs that are coming on in human trials now are very promising. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we're on the road to developing some useful nicotinic therapies."

Tabitha M Powledge

Tabitha M Powledge is a freelance science writer who specialises in neuroscience, genomics, and science policy. Email: tam@nasw.org

Copyright 2004 T.M. Powledge. The above article is an edited version of an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


Related information

The original article, Nicotine as Therapy, is published online at: http://www.pubmedcentral.org/articlerender.fcgi?artid=526783

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posted February 06, 2006 01:54 PM         

Now that you've told your entire cheering section, you can't *possibly* flub this!!
You know we'll either give you moral support or spankings, whichever may apply

posted February 06, 2006 02:17 PM         

Reading that article was sorta' funny.. simply because I was going to post about how foggy headed I feel.. I have to read sentances three times for the simplest thing to make sense.. I am certainly not 'on the ball' today.

posted February 07, 2006 12:08 AM         

Congratulations, by the way! You know, now that you don't smoke anymore, you'd be a great poster-girl for anti-smoking campaigns. You could have your picture up on billboards, with a caption like "See how hot non-smokers are?"

Get it? Hot? Smokers? ! Nevermind.

posted February 07, 2006 02:45 AM         

on a psycho-spiritual astrological level, nicotine is earth and is smoked (fire) therefore grounds those who tend to drift (air)..and feels deeply (water),,, it assists in balancing certain natures.

pix, i quit cold turkey last year when i became pregnant and i still crave them, i don't know if doing it that way works. your a fixed girl, you may need some re-programing.. ie hypno or laser accupressure.

posted February 07, 2006 02:53 AM         

My chart is made up of mostly Air, followed closely by Water, with a smidgen of Fire to keep things interesting.

I smoke about half a pack a day (and drink 4+ shots of espresso too). I certainly love my (mild) stimulants.