The primary cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD is smoking tobacco. Studies continue to show that people who suffer from COPD have a much more difficult time with smoking cessation. Smoking cessation is the only real way of slowing down the progression of the disease. The sooner someone stops smoking, the slower their disease will progress.
A recent study out of Nicotine and Tobacco Research looked at the ability of certain front line smoking cessation aids to meet with this COPD challenge. The primary outcome measured was continuous abstinence rates from 9 - 24 weeks, or between 2 and 6 months of smoking cessation. They found that severe and very severe COPD patients were primarily male. Interestingly, this large subgroup of the study population had a very high physical addiction to nicotine.
The results show a continuous abstinence rate between weeks 9-24 to be 48.5%. So just slightly less than half were able to stay nicotine free between the study period of 9-24 weeks. The abstinence rate differed according to type of stop smoking aid utilized.
Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) had a 38.2% cessation rate. It also had the fewest recorded side effects. However, the dreaded psychiatric symptoms sometimes reported were rare in all stop smoking methods studied and evenly distributed across all groups. Bupropion (Zyban) had a quit rate of 55.6%, while varenicline (Chantix) had the highest cessation rate of 58.3%.
This study only points out the difficulty associated with smoking cessation in someone who is afflicted with a multi-dimensional disease like COPD. This disease carries with it many other complicatiang diseases which affect the physical, emotional and psychiatric status of the sufferer. It is no surprise that something more than simple nicotine replacement was needed to help these people break the cycle of nicotine dependence.
People often ask, " is nicotine bad for you?" I think the answer is pretty evident. The dependence creates a continuous assault on the health of your body. Then you suddenly wake up 30-40 years later with a disease, or more than likely, a mix of diseases, that affects everything from how you breathe, to how far you can walk each day.
According to this study though, it's not too late. You can still quit, despite your disease status. So get some help and do the right thing, for yourself and for your family.
