A new study brings good news for people who want to quit smoking. It highlights a low-cost stop-smoking pill called cytisine.
Although not well-known in many parts of the world, cytisine has been used in Eastern Europe since the 1960s and could be a game-changer for public health.
Cytisine is a plant-based medicine first made in Bulgaria in 1964. It was sold under the name Tabex and has helped many people stop smoking by reducing the withdrawal symptoms that make quitting difficult.
It’s still being used today in some countries. For example, it is sold as Desmoxan in Poland with a doctor’s prescription and as Cravv in Canada without one.
What makes cytisine special is how affordable it is. This is very important in countries where healthcare is expensive or hard to access. Many people in low- and middle-income countries can’t afford treatments to help them quit smoking, and cytisine could offer them a chance to stop.
The study, published in the journal Addiction, was led by Dr. Omar Di Santi. He and his team looked at data from eight high-quality clinical trials that included nearly 6,000 people. The results were strong and clear: people who took cytisine were more than twice as likely to quit smoking than those who took a placebo. In simple terms, cytisine made a big difference.
The researchers also compared cytisine to other stop-smoking treatments like nicotine patches and gums, and a drug called varenicline. Cytisine worked slightly better than nicotine replacement, but it wasn’t clearly better than varenicline. Still, it showed that cytisine is a solid and effective option.
There’s a problem, though: cytisine is not available in many parts of the world. Even though it is cheap and effective, it hasn’t been approved or marketed in a lot of countries. That means people who could benefit from it simply can’t get it.
This raises a big issue in global health. Many helpful and affordable treatments are not available where they are needed most. Cytisine could help millions of people quit smoking, but only if they have access to it. Smoking is one of the top causes of preventable deaths around the world, and finding low-cost ways to help people quit is essential.
In short, cytisine is a low-cost, effective medicine that could help people stop smoking, especially in countries where money and healthcare access are limited. It’s been around for decades but has remained under the radar. This new study shines a light on its potential and calls for making it more available across the globe.
If you are interested in smoking and health, you might want to check out other studies about why some non-smokers get lung disease and why some heavy smokers don’t. There’s also new research showing that drugs used for quitting smoking may even help treat Parkinson’s disease.
For heart health, recent studies have found new ways to help prevent heart attacks and strokes, and even suggest that a heart disease drug might lower your risk of getting COVID-19.
If you care about mental health, please read studies about cannabis use disorder linked to increased risk of mental diseases and some mental health drugs can cause rapid weight gain.
For more health information, please read studies that one sleepless night can reverse depression for days and scientists find better treatment for older adults with depression.
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