Question: Quitting Smoking with Nicotine Patches There is no longer any doubt that smoking cigarettes is hazardous to your health and to those around you. Yet, for someone addicted to smoking, quitting is no simple matter. One promising technique for helping people to quit smoking is to apply a patch to the skin that dispenses nicotine into the blood. These "nicotine patches" have become one of the most frequently prescribed medications in the United States. To test the effectiveness of these patches on the cessation of smoking, Dr. Richard Hurt and his colleagues recruited 240 smokers at Mayo Clinics in Rochester, Minnesota; Jacksonville, Florida; and Scottsdale, Arizona. Volunteers were required to be between the ages of 20 and 65, have an expired carbon monoxide level of 10 ppm or greater (showing that they were indeed smokers), be in good health, have a history of smoking at least 20 cigarettes per day for the past year, and be motivated to quit.
Volunteers were randomly assigned to receive either 22-mg nicotine patches or placebo patches for 8 weeks. They were also provided with an intervention program recommended by the National Cancer Institute, in which they received counseling before, during, and for many months after the 8-week period of wearing the patches. After the 8-week period of patch use, almost half (46%) of the nicotine group had quit smoking, whereas only one-fifth (20%) of the placebo group had. Having quit was defined as "self-reported abstinence (not even a puff) since the last visit and an expired air carbon monoxide level of 8 ppm or less" (p. 596). After a year, rates in both groups had declined, but the group that had received the nicotine patch still had a higher percentage who had successfully quit than did the placebo group: 27.5% versus 14.2%. The study was double-blind, so neither the participants nor the nurses taking the measurements knew who had received the active nicotine patches. The study was funded by a grant from Lederle Laboratories and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.