Here's What Your Metabolism Can Tell You About How You You Should Quit Smoking

Quitting smoking isn't always so easy. Statistics show that just about 70 percent of people who attempt to quit will relapse in as little as one week. Yet it appears that assessing how the bodies of smokers breakdown their nicotine addictions could improve the odds of how easily they can quit. 

Previous studies have suggested that those who break down nicotine faster actually crave more cigarettes, making it harder to quit. Now, in a new randomized trial, researchers found that the best treatment for individuals essentially depends on how quickly nicotine is metabolized by the body.

This highly addictive substance is found in cigarettes, causing the consumer to crave more of the product. However, urgency levels oftentimes vary among individuals.

For the study, researchers examined 1,246 smokers who received behavioral counseling. The participants were either placed on a nicotine replacement patch or given Champix (varenicline), a smoking cessation drug.

Researchers looked at the participants' blood to determine if nicotine was broken down at a slow or normal rate by using a biomarker known as nicotine metabolite ratio (NMR), which revealed that 662 of the participants were slow metabolizers and the rest were normal metabolizers.

Those with normal metabolisms were more likely to stay away from smoking after taking the smoking cessation drug when compared to those who used the patch.

By the end of the study, close to 39 percent of those taking varenicline were not smoking--a significantly higher number compared to the 23 percent rate of those who used the patch; this suggests that varenicline is a more effective treatment for normal metabolizers with 28 percent quit rates in smokers who used the patch and 30 percent in those who took the pill. Furthermore, researchers found that slow metabolizers were more likely to experience a variation of side effects when using varenicline, including weight gain.

"Matching a treatment based on the rate at which smokers metabolise nicotine could be a viable clinical strategy to help individual smokers choose the cessation method that will work best for them," concluded Caryn Lerman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-led the study, in a news release. 

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

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