Ciggyfree Blog

Smoking plays a role in lung cancer development, and now scientists have shown that smoking also affects the way genes are expressed, leading to alterations in cell division and regulation of immune response. Notably, some of the changes in gene expression persisted in people who had quit smoking many years earlier. These findings by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, appeared in the Feb. 20, 2008, issue of PLoS ONE.

“Smoking, we are well aware, is the leading cause of lung cancer worldwide,” said NCI Director John E. Niederhuber, M.D. “Yet, a mechanistic understanding of the effects of smoking on the cells of the lung remains incomplete. This study demonstrates an important piece of this complicated puzzle. Greater understanding of the genetic alterations that occur with smoking should provide greater insight into the development of cellular targets for treating, and possibly preventing, lung cancer.”

“We were able to look at actual lung tissue, tumor and non-tumor, taking into account the differences by gender, verifying the smoking status by measuring levels of cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine, in participants’ plasma, and confirming results in independent samples,” said Maria Teresa Landi, M.D., Ph.D., in NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, the first author of the study report.
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The mentally ill consume 45% of the cigarettes smoked in America these days, the WSJ reports. A striking figure in its own right, the number takes on new significance amid reports of psychological troubles associated with Pfizer’s anti-smoking drug Chantix.

Nicotine increases the level of dopamine in the brain’s reward center — a powerfully addictive effect. And as reports have emerged of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in patients taking Chantix, Pfizer has pointed out that, even in the absence of drug treatment, quitting smoking can have a powerful effect on the mind.

But, the FDA suggested, taking Chantix — which binds to the same neural receptors as nicotine — may add to the psychological tumult, at least for some patients. And because the mentally ill were excluded from the drug’s pre-approval clinical trials, it’s hard to know where mental illness fits into the picture.

Still, the benefits of quitting smoking are so great that some degree of risk should be tolerable in a drug that helps people quit. “If you have a history of depression, you need to be careful when you stop smoking that it doesn’t come back,” John Hughes, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and a Pfizer adviser, told the WSJ. But for people who’ve failed to quit with a nicotine patch and are thinking about using Chantix, he wouldn’t avoid the drug over fears of mental problems: “The risk is so small under a physician’s care, and the benefit is so huge.”
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