Stop Smoking

If you are chain smoker, you will know how addicted your body has become to smoking cigarettes and the craving for nicotine. What if you are trying to control the habit and cut down on smoking, this will help you improve your health as well. There are several products to help you with this although the stop smoking vaccine that stops you smoking because you no longer get a ‘kick’ from the nicotine is becoming a reality. The stop smoking vaccine has been developed by the Swiss biotechnology company Cytos that treats nicotine addiction.

How does the stop smoking vaccine work you might wonder. Well the vaccine uses part of a protein that exerts a pull on an immune response to nicotine. To prevent the nicotine from getting through to the brain, the antibodies bind to the nicotine. The incentive to smoke weakens as there isn’t a ‘high’ from the nicotine therefore making it much easier for addictive smokers to give up tobacco.

In the study conducted by Prof. Dr. Jacques Cornuz of University Hospital Lausanne, revealed that 57% of smokers who received the stop smoking vaccine achieved high levels of antibodies against nicotine. After the smokers received the stop smoking vaccine, they stopped smoking completely for at least six months. A fascinating fact is that 31% of those people who received a dummy stop smoking vaccine also happened to quit smoking. Those who developed lower levels of antibodies also quit smoking that was estimated to be 33%.

However, there are some minor side effects of the stop smoking vaccine that is redness and tenderness at the injection site while some experienced flu-like symptoms but that was resolved within 24 hours.

Although the addictive smoker has attempted to quit smoking numerous times, the percentage of those who actually manage to quit and become smoke free is still pretty low. Many of them attempt nicotine replacement therapy, counseling and sometimes antidepressants but only one in every 20 smokers succeeds in quitting in the long run.
There are a number of other companies that are also looking into the development of a vaccine for smoking aside from Cytos and they are the Xenova Group, Nabi Biopharmaceuticals and Prommune. The stop smoking vaccine may just become a truly revolutionary treatment that will help the addictive smoker quit for good and increase the number of those who have stopped smoking once and for all.