Brain Stroke Has Shown The Way To Better Anti-Smoking Aids

A study on stroke patients has shown that a particular region of the brain is associated with smoking and could be targeted for developing efficient anti-smoking aids.

According to BBC, researchers studied people who suffered brain damage following stroke only to find that those whose insular cortex brain region was damaged were able to quit smoking easily. For the study, researchers scanned brains of 156 participants who were told by their doctors to quit smoking after suffering a stroke.

Conventional pharmaco-therapies to combat tobacco dependence target a reward pathway in the brain. However many smokers give up efforts to quit smoking due to severe withdrawal symptoms. Studies in the past have ignored the insular cortex, which the new study's researchers have shown to help smokers shake off their nicotine dependence while experiencing fewer and less severe withdrawal effects.

In the study 70 percent of the patients who suffered damage to the insular cortex region quit smoking in three months as against 37 percent who were affected in other regions of the brain.

"Current smokers with damage to their insular cortex brain region appear to experience fewer and less severe tobacco withdrawal symptoms, and appear to be less likely to require nicotine replacement therapy during hospitalization, compared with smokers with non-insular damage," researchers wrote in the journal Addiction.

"These findings support the potential role of the insular cortex in regulating withdrawal during abstinence, a motivator responsible for the maintenance of addictive behaviors," they said.