Doctors typically wait until smokers are ready to quit before prescribing pills to help them do it. But a new study has found that even for those who are not ready to stop smoking immediately, medicine taken over time can substantially improve their chances of eventually quitting.
Clinical practice guidelines have long advised doctors to have their patients set a precise quit date before prescribing medicine such as Chantix, the pills used to treat nicotine addiction that were examined in the study. The idea was that such medicine should not be prescribed for someone who is not serious about quitting. In some cases, insurance plans would not pay for the pills if no quit date had been set.
But in a study published in JAMA on Tuesday, researchers found that even for patients who wanted to stop smoking eventually, the pills were effective, opening the way to a much larger population of patients whom doctors could potentially treat.
David Abrams, executive director of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, said studies of nicotine replacement therapy, such as patches and gum, had long shown that attempts to quit gradually over time are a good way to change lifetime habits. The current study appears to show the same for pills, he said.
[For more of this story, written by Sabrina Tavernise, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...ture.html?ref=health]
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