Low nicotine cigarettes encourages smoking cessation: study

Cigarette smoking claims the lives of 480,000 individuals in the United States alone every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Over 41,000 of these deaths are linked to exposure to second hand smoke. Recently, a new study has found that cigarettes with reduced nicotine can help smokers cut down on the number of sticks they consume in a day, NBC News reports.

A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine said that while this evidence is only preliminary, researchers believe that regulating nicotine content in cigarettes may help smoking cessation. Researchers studied 840 smokers who had no intentions of quitting in a span of six weeks, and used questionnaires to measure smoking dependence, nicotine withdrawal, depression and craving.

Typically, a regular cigarette contains 15.8 milligrams of nicotine per gram of tobacco. Researchers noted that there was no difference in smoking behavior when nicotine levels were decreased to 5.2 mg. Additionally, when nicotine was lowered to 2.4 mg, the number of cigarettes smoked also declined. Smokers consumed 21.3 cigarettes weekly with 15.8 mg, and dropped to 16.5 cigarettes per week with 2.4 mg of nicotine.

According to Reuters, researchers found that an 85 to 97 percent reduction in nicotine resulted to 23 percent reduction in number of cigarettes smoked. The goal of the study was to provide the US Food and Drug Administration an scientific basis for decreasing nicotine in tobacco products.

"We believe these data support exploration of a national nicotine-reduction policy, and we recommend that additional attention be paid to low-nicotine cigarettes as a potential clinical smoking-cessation resource," Drs. Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health wrote in the commentary.

Dr. Norman Edelman, senior scientific advisor for the American Lung Association said that cigarettes with regular nicotine levels and a vent system that supposedly helped smokers consume less cigarettes were not helpful in smoking cessation.

Edelman explained, "Smokers got around it by inhaling more deeply and more often. That's been the accepted truism."

However, he had positive views on this recent study. He commented, "Now here comes this very well done study and it shows that if you simply reduce the nicotine in the tobacco, that doesn't seem to happen. Smokers don't seem to increase their consumption of cigarettes because they're getting less nicotine."

Reuters reports that according to chief study author Eric Donny of the University of Pittsburgh, "These cigarettes don't have much nicotine in the tobacco itself, so no matter what the user does, it's just not there to extract. This is a very different approach, and this one might make smokers less dependent on cigarettes and better able to quit."