Vaccine To Stop Smoking

If you are chain smoker, you will know how addicted your body has become to smoking cigarettes and the craving for nicotine.What if you are trying to control the habit and cut down on smoking, this will help you improve your health as well. Various products claim to offer an easy way to stop smoking and the stop smoking vaccine can help you quit the habit when you no longer get a boost from nicotine.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 uses part of a protein that exerts a pull on an immune response to nicotine. To prevent the nicotine from getting through to the brain, the antibodies bind to the nicotine.The incentive to smoke weakens as there isn’t a high from the nicotine therefore making it much easier for addictive smokers to give up tobacco.

According to a study conducted by Prof. Dr. Jacques Cornuz of University Hospital Lusanne, 57% of smokers who was administered the stop smoking vaccine developed 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.Those who developed lower levels of antibodies also quit smoking that was estimated to be 33%.

However, there are some minor side effects of the stop smoking vaccine that is redness and tenderness at the injection site while some experienced flu-like symptoms but that was resolved within 24 hours.

The actual percentage of those who truly manage to stop smoking is very low although many chronic smokers try desperately to quit the

habit.Although most of them seek nicotine replacement therapy,counseling and even antidepressants, only one in every 20 smokers ever succeeds in getting rid of the habit completely.

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.