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Happy Turkey Day. I imagine everyone out there maxed out on food and the trimmings and too cross-eyed to be worried about GUS. It's certain that the description applies to me.
But something caught my eye last Monday, which just could be incredibly good news for the long suffering smoker.
I'm a subscriber to the service 'Medscape', and their weekly email came in, with one of the headlines, "Nicotine Patch Plus Lozenge Best Therapy for Smoking Cessation" , which led to http://cme.medscape.com/... (subscription only, no fee).
The major takeaway from the story is this:
"When you get a 40% quit rate at 6 months in a group, that's really promising for smokers who are trying so hard to quit."
More from the introduction:
November 10, 2009 — An important head-to-head study of smoking cessation therapies shows that combination treatment with a nicotine patch plus lozenge almost doubles the rate of abstinence at 6 months compared with placebo, new research suggests.
"This is the first time that a head-to-head study has been done looking at all the different smoking cessation pharmacotherapies, and it's also one of the first times that combination therapies have been looked at in a large sample," said lead author Megan E. Piper, PhD, assistant professor, Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The study was published in the November issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
The trial included 1504 adults who smoked an average of 10 or more cigarettes a day for at least the past 6 months and were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 interventions:
In my own case, it took years of Nicotine gum before I eventually gave up, first smoking, then nicotine (Yay me!)
It looks like this study offers increased hope for smoking sufferers as, with combination therapy, there is a good chance (40%, on average) that they can be smoking-free for 6 months. From my own experience, this is exactly the period when relapse is most likely.
Good news?
The original article is here.
I return you back to your 'I wish I hadn't eaten as much!' T-day evening.
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