Tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, taking the lives of about 440,000 people (Centers for Disease Control, 2004). It is commonly believed that nicotine is the key agent in the addictive properties of tobacco smoking. Nicotine is a direct agonist of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which are largely expressed through the brain. At the present time, n...

Smoking, the most prominent nongenetic factor contributing to mortality, remains the major public health problem throughout the world. There are nearly 1.1 billion users of nicotine and tobacco products worldwide while approximately one third to half of them will die from smoking-related disease. The habit of smoking is mainly propelled by nicotine, a strongly addictive substance, to which the ...

Nicotine has roles in the addiction to smoking, replacement therapy for smoking cessation, as a potential medication for several diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and ulcerative colitis. The absorbed nicotine is rapidly and extensively metabolized and eliminated to urine. A major pathway of nicotine metabolism is C-oxidation to cotinine, which is catalyzed by CYP2A6 in ...

Cost-effectiveness analysis, even with its inherent methodological problems, consistently shows that when smoking cessation interventions are effective they are invariably also cost-effective. This is largely due to their relative low cost and the big impact that stopping smoking has on health outcomes. This is also the case for pharmacotherapy for smoking cessation, including nicotine replacem...

INTRODUCTION From March 19 through June 10, 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the first federally funded National Tobacco Education Campaign: Tips From Former Smokers (Tips). This study examined the campaign's impact on quitline callers' intermediate cessation outcomes. METHODS We used quitline data from 23 states to examine changes in enrollment, service utilizati...