New research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine may help more smokers keep their New Year's resolution by helping them quit smoking. Extended use of a nicotine patch - 24 weeks versus the standard eight weeks recommended by manufacturers - boosts the number of smokers who maintain their cigarette abstinence and helps more of those who backslide into the habit while wearing the patch, according to a study which will be published in the February 2 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
"Our data suggest that the many smokers who relapse while trying to quit will be especially helped by extended treatment, which appears to make it easier for smokers to 'get back on the wagon' after a small smoking slip, instead of having it turn into a full-blown relapse," says lead author Robert Schnoll, PhD, an associate professor of Psychiatry at Penn. "We know that tobacco dependence is a chronic, relapsing condition that may require extended treatment, and we hope our research efforts will encourage physicians to recommend to their patients that they use nicotine patches for a longer duration."
Schnoll and senior author Caryn Lerman, PhD, a Mary W. Calkins Professor of Psychiatry and Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center, studied 568 adult smokers who smoked 10 or more cigarettes per day for at least the past year. At the end of the 24-week study, smokers who used a nicotine patch throughout the whole trial were about two times as likely to have been successful in their quitting attempts than those who received a placebo patch after the eighth week of the study: 31.6 percent of extended therapy participants had not smoked in the past seven days, compared to 20.3 percent of standard therapy participants. More than nineteen percent of participants on the extended patch regimen did not smoke at all, even a puff, during the trial, compared to 12.6 percent of those who stopped getting the active transdermal therapy after week eight. The benefits also extended to those who relapsed during the study: The smokers on extended therapy abstained from cigarettes for longer, and were more likely to stop smoking again even if they relapsed.
When the researchers followed up with participants at week 52, however, they found no difference in the main measures of smoking abstinence between those who had used the extended patch therapy (14.5 percent) and those who used the standard regimen (14.3 percent), though the extended patch users were more likely (29.1 percent vs. 21.3 percent) to have reported no periods of smoking lasting more than 7 days in a row -- during the entire year.