Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Can Help Smokers Quit, Study

Now cigarettes with low levels of nicotine could help smokers to bring down the frequency of their smoking and even stop it, according to Reuters .

Scientists conducted the study from July 2013 to July 2014 on 840 persons aged 18 or above that. All of them smoked at least five times a day and could not quit.

Scientiests gave them their usual brand or the reduced nicotine fags with 15 percent less nicotine than typical cigarettes for six weeks.

At the end of the period, researchers felt that those who shifted to lower nicotine cigarettes smoked 23 to 33 percent less than others. Their dependence on nicotine also came down by 20 percent. They did not seem to show any discomfort from the withdrawal, said the scientists.

However, the other group that went with its usual dose of nicotine continued it.

These reduced nicotine cigarettes were not the same as the "light" cigarettes on the market, which did not have a lower nicotine content but just made it tougher for the smokers to inhale it. Smokers inhaling "light" cigarettes finally learnt to do it more effectively.

"This is a very different approach, and this one might make smokers less dependent on cigarettes and better able to quit," lead study author Eric Donny at the University of Pittsburgh told Reuters. "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."

One month after the six-week period, researchers found that 35 percent of those who smoked lower nicotine cigarettes tried to quit smoking in a month.

Hence, it is clear that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should consider limiting the nicotine content of cigarettes, said Matthew M. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids said. The FDA, which funded the study, had been authorized by Congress to "explore whether there is a level below which nicotine yields do not produce dependence," according to the Los Angeles Times.

A physician at Stanford Medical School who was not involved in the study, told the Los Angeles Times: "When so many people are dying from the results of smoking, the most addictive drug known to man, a bias towards action seems well justified."

The study was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.