What Is A Smoking Vaccine

by Nicholas Strattberg

A smoking vaccine is essentially a nicotine vaccine. What makes a vaccine for smoking necessary is the addictive nature of nicotine. Nicotine is found in sufficient addictive levels in tobacco. Tobacco leaves produce nicotine to protect themselves against grazing animals.

It doesn't altogether matter how tobacco is administered for it to be addictive. Smoking tobacco is as equally addictive as smokeless tobacco which is mainly in the form of chewing tobacco and snuff. When a smoking person takes a puff nicotine in tobacco leaves is transmitted into the bloodstream through the lining of the lungs.

Within 10 to 15 seconds of a puff nicotine reaches the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier. It them attaches itself to brain receptors which in turn are stimulated to release dopamine a neurotransmitter responsible for the generation of pleasure. The repeated use of nicotine leads to nicotine dependency.

Quitting smoking is very difficult because of severe nicotine dependency due to continued use of tobacco. In fact researchers have shown that it is more difficult to break nicotine dependency than it is to overcome heroin addiction.

A smoking vaccine is a molecular intervention that aims to help smokers quit smoking by preventing nicotine from reaching the brain. A nicotine vaccine as it is also known stimulates the production of specific anti-bodies that attach themselves to nicotine molecules.

The net effect of this intervention is the enlargement of nicotine molecules in the blood making them too big to cross the blood-brain barrier. Without entering the brain, nicotine is unable to cause any addiction. Any continued smoking would be mere "academic" without any desired pleasurable results.

For this reason vaccines for smoking are promising breakthroughs in helping millions of people who smoke finally kick the smoking habit. The most promising and leading nicotine vaccine is NicVax. NicVax is expected to receive approval from the FDA in late 2011.

The NicVax smoking vaccine will be given as a smoking shot over a period of six months. Such a vaccine for smoking competes with other stop smoking products such as nicotine patches, nicotine chewing gum and nicotine inhalers. The NicVax vaccine as been shown to have a very satisfactory tolerance amongst users. It also has no side effects such as depression and suicidal thoughts as is the case with many other stop smoking remedies.

Vaccines to stop smoking also have a higher success rate than traditional quit smoking products. NicVax was shown to have 35 percent success rate as compared to 10 percent on other products.

A smoking vaccine might just be that miracle cure that will tremendously cut down the international tobacco 5 million per year death rate.

SITE MAP

script type="text/javascript"> var infolink_pid = 229591; var infolink_wsid = 0;