New Study Provides Powerful Evidence that Lowering Nicotine Content of

People smoking cigarettes with 5.2 mg/g or more smoked an average of 21 cigarettes per day, which was about the same as people who kept smoking their own brand, the findings showed.

“There was concern that participants who reduced cigarette intake would “oversmoke” cigarettes as a compensatory measure, but the study did not find this”, said Benowitz. The report said among those assigned to the cigarettes with 1.3-milligram or 0.4-milligram per gram, the number of cigarettes they were smoking at that point was “significantly lower” than the most-concentrated nicotine group.

“Light” cigarettes failed to help because smokers would just puff harder and inhale more deeply, and wound up getting the same dose of nicotine as they would have in a normal cigarette, Donny and Hatsukami said.

Lenox Hill Hospital pulmonary specialist Dr. Len Horovitz comments, “A previous study showed that adolescents who smoke from age 13 to 17 are the least likely group to quit smoking”.

In drafting the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, Congress prohibited the agency from lowering nicotine “yields” in cigarettes to zero.

The New England Journal of Medicine published the results Wednesday.

Right now the center that Mr. Donny oversees is taking the research further, hoping to recruit 1,250 people, who will use the cigarette products for up to five months.

Such a move might signal to the public that cigarettes are now safer, and it’s OK to light up, Edelman said.

This study should serve as a catalyst for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish standards requiring the reduction of nicotine content in cigarettes. It also provides solid evidence of the level of nicotine needed to accomplish that goal.

Additionally the lower-nicotine smokers reported less dependence and cravings.

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh found that nicotine content is a significant determinant of cigarette use and dependence. Adverse events were generally mild and similar for smokers in all groups.

“People seem perfectly content to smoke these lower-nicotine cigarettes, not only perfectly content, but it appeared that because they got less satisfaction, they were more interested in quitting”, said Dr. Norman Edelman, a senior scientific advisor for the American Lung Association.

“The FDA can regulate aspects of the product that authorities in other regions cannot, or are not now considering, despite it being recommended by the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control”, she explains.

Future research will focus on the effectiveness of immediate nicotine reduction versus a gradual tapering, and the use of a transdermal patch in tandem with low-nicotine cigarettes. Carcinogen exposure fell by about 15 percent with the two lowest-nicotine cigarettes. “When we see a product that’s coming on the market as strong as [the e-cig] has, it threatens to normalize smoking behavior in a very broad sense”.

Smokers given reduced-nicotine cigarettes weren’t more likely to experience bothersome withdrawal symptoms, Donny said.

Something she thinks is “highly unlikely”.

The FDA declined to comment on the study, but the director of its Center for Tobacco Products, Mitch Zeller, said in a statement that “though all tobacco products are potentially harmful and potentially addictive, different categories of tobacco products may have the potential for varying effects on public health”. He has not heard of any movement on that, however, he said.