Smoking

Efforts to discourage new smokers and help people to quit are bringing smoking rates down in many places, but it’s going to take more to put an end to tobacco smoking altogether.

Statistics show that, despite some progress towards smoking cessation, tobacco continues to place an extraordinarily heavy burden on global health.

A lack of resources and interference from the tobacco industry make it difficult to strengthen anti-smoking regulations.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is already approved to help people overcome addiction to cigarettes, but researchers still have a lot to learn about how to deliver the treatment effectively.

As e-cigarettes grow in popularity, the lack of knowledge about whether nicotine contributes to the damaging health effects of smoking is becoming more worrying.

Established nicotine replacement therapies combined with behavioural counselling could offer the best chance of beating nicotine addiction.

A meta-analysis using the Burden of proof method reported consistent evidence supporting harmful associations between smoking and 28 different health outcomes.

There is abundant evidence that e-cigarettes can help some individuals to quit smoking, so they should be more widely recommended as smoking cessation aids.

Lesions resulting in addiction remission occur in multiple different brain locations but map to a specific brain circuit.

A study of mice exposed to cigarette smoke suggests that smoking-cessation-induced weight gain is associated with a dysbiotic state that is driven by smoking-related metabolites.

A multi-ancestry meta-regression study analyses diverse genome-wide association studies and genome loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use.

This Primer describes the epidemiology, mechanisms, diagnosis and management of tobacco use and tobacco use disorder. Moreover, this Primer discusses the quality of life issues associated with tobacco use and provides an overview of future research avenues for this field.

A randomized controlled trial comparing the efficacy of electronic cigarettes and nicotine patches for smoking cessation in pregnant women found no differences between the interventions. However, electronic cigarettes were found to have some benefit when only the data from women who adhered strictly to the trial protocol were analyzed.