Vaccine To Stop Smoking

If you are a heavy smoker, you are probably aware of the body’s addiction to smoking cigarettes and nicotine cravings.The decision to cut down on smoking or control the habit would help your health to improve drastically. There are several products to help you with this although the stop smoking vaccine that stops you smoking because you no longer get a kick from the nicotine is becoming a reality.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. Therefore, the formed antibodies stick to the nicotine molecules to stop them from reaching the brain.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.

In the study conducted by Prof. Dr. Jacques Cornuz of University Hospital Lausanne, revealed that 57% of smokers who received the stop smoking vaccine achieved high levels of antibodies against nicotine. Upon receiving the stop smoking vaccine, they quit the habit for at least six months. A fascinating fact is that 31% of those people who received a dummy stop smoking vaccine also happened to quit smoking.Those who developed lower levels of antibodies also quit smoking that was estimated to be 33%.

However, certain side effects such as redness and sensitivity at the injection site and also some flu-like symptoms which would generally disappear within 24 hours, are associated with the stop smoking vaccine.

Although the addictive smoker has attempted to quit smoking numerous times, the percentage of those who actually manage to quit and become smoke free is still pretty low.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.