Vaccine To Stop Smoking
If you are a heavy smoker, you are probably aware of the body’s addiction to smoking cigarettes and nicotine cravings.The decision to cut down on smoking or control the habit would help your health to improve drastically. 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 Swiss biotechnology company Cytos which develops products to treat nicotine addiction developed the stop smoking vaccine.
You might wonder how the stop smoking vaccine work.Well the vaccine employs part of a protein that trigger an immune response to the chemical nicotine.Therefore, the formed antibodies stick to the nicotine molecules to stop them from reaching the brain.As there is no kick from the administered nicotine, the craving to smoke reduces making it much easier for chronic smokers to quit the habit.
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. It is interesting to see that 31% of the people who was given a mock stop smoking vaccine also stopped smoking.Even 33% of the individuals who developed lower antibody levels quit smoking.
However, certain side effects such as redness and sensitivity at the injection site and also some flu-like symptoms which would generally disappear within 24 hours, are associated with the stop smoking vaccine.
The actual percentage of those who truly manage to stop smoking is very low although many chronic smokers try desperately to quit the habit.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 vaccine to stop smoking 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.
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