Drug a powerful aid for smokers

PHILADELPHIA (MCT) — Anthony Tarducci has tried to quit smoking many times over the past 25 years. He's gone cold turkey, slapped on the patch, even taken antidepressants. Nothing worked.

On June 23 he tried again, this time with a powerful new aid: Chantix — the anti-smoking medicine that was approved for sale in the United States 18 months ago.

Today, the 45-year-old considers himself an ex-smoker, and he credits the drug with enabling him to kick his more-than-a-pack-a-day habit.

"What I found with everything else I tried was I still had that urge, I still had that craving," says Tarducci. "When I was on Chantix I never had any of that. I just didn't want to smoke anymore."

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between Chantix and other anti-smoking pharmaceuticals.

The others substitute a cigarette's nicotine — the component that makes it physically addictive as well as pleasurable — with their own. Smokers can then quit the habit while getting their nicotine-induced pleasure elsewhere.

Chantix, on the other hand, was designed to give pleasure without nicotine.

The Pfizer drug, whose scientific name is varenicline, appears to work in two ways: It blocks nicotine from binding to receptors in the brain that trigger the release of dopamine, a chemical neurotransmitter that generates feelings of pleasure. At the same time, Chantix stimulates the brain to release some dopamine, which reduces symptoms of withdrawal.

But Chantix is still far from a sure thing. Less than half of smokers manage to stay off cigarettes during the typical 12-week prescription. Even fewer, just one in four, remain smoke free after a year.

Head-to-head comparisons have found it gets significantly better results than other anti-smoking aids. Researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year that 23 percent of Chantix users still weren't smoking 12 months later vs. 15 percent of those who relied on a commonly used antidepressant, burpropion, and fewer who quit cold turkey.

"Chantix is the most effective FDA-approved treatment for smoking," says Freda Patterson, a project director at the University of Pennsylvania's Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center. "Still, only a fraction of smokers looking to quit do so effectively."

The reason, as she and other scientists have known for years, is that "smoking is a behavioral as well as a biological addiction."