Medications that help smokers quit appear to have another benefit: reducing heavy drinking.
Researchers randomly divided the participants into four groups. One group received the smoking cessation drug and a placebo form of a nicotine-containing mouth spray; another received placebo varenicline and active mouth spray; the third received the smoking cessation drug cytisine and placebo mouth spray; the fourth received placebo cytisine and active mouth spray.
Smoking levels dropped, too, for up to 12 months, sometimes to the point of abstinence, according to the researchers. By 3 months, 84 of 400 participants had stopped drinking altogether, which the researchers biochemically verified. Self-reports showed that this level of alcohol abstinence was maintained at 6 and 12 months.
"We were pretty surprised to see that there was no difference in how well any of these meds helped people reduce their alcohol," Tindle said. The mouth spray used in the study is not available over the counter in the United States, but Tindle said nonprescription nicotine replacements are understood to be effective and are available in lozenge, patch, or spray form.
"It adds to the evidence base that there's benefit to smoking cessation medications. There's real value in helping people quit smoking," said Stephanie O'Malley, PhD, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, who has studiedTindle noted that cytisine is available in Russia but not in the United States. One reason her group conducted the trial in St.