Smoking Cessation: It Is Never Too Late

Public health and smoking are old enemies because smoking is among the 10 leading causes of ill health on a global scale and is also possible to prevent, as repeatedly reported (1). In both developed and developing countries, smoking takes its heavy toll of lives every year, both directly and indirectly, through exposure to passively inhaled tobacco smoke (2) or via feto-placental effects. Much research efforts have been devoted to finding news ways to help the individual smoker quit the harmful habit, not only based on individual (3) or group-based support activities (4), as supported by the whole health care team, but also on ways of prescribing both older and newer drugs to support smoking cessation. Even if nicotine replacement therapy (5) in its various forms has been around for almost 3 decades and the atypical antidepressant bupropion (6) for ∼10 years, new target drugs are constantly being developed to support the addicted smoker in quitting permanently. Such drugs may be useful for very large groups of addicted smokers who have tried the other ways to quit in vain. One example is varenicline, a partial nicotine receptor agonist that has been proven successful in randomized controlled trials, both for smoking cessation and for relapse prevention (7–10). The effect is more pronounced than recorded by use of nicotine replacement therapy or bupropion.

Other ways might also exist to achieve smoking cessation, such as the use of acupuncture, hypnosis, or psychopharmacological approaches, but these remedies are less well proven and therefore not truly evidence based.