Acute cardiac effects of nicotine in healthy young adults.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), published as a randomized controlled trial.

Nicotine is known to have many physiologic effects.

The influence of nicotine delivered in chewing gum upon cardiac hemodynamics and conduction has not been well-characterized.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, both men and women.

After 40 minutes, subjects were again given nicotine gum or placebo in cross-over fashion.

Standard echocardiographic measurements were made from two-dimensional images.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Because people in this Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

As a double-blind Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) group a baseline to be compared against.

Each person switched between Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

After 20 minutes (approximate time to peak nicotine levels), echocardiograms and signal-averaged electrocardiograms (SAECG) were obtained.

The researchers then calculated end-systolic wall stress (ESWS), shortening fraction (SF), systemic vascular resistance (SVR), velocity for circumferential fiber shortening corrected for heart rate (Vcfc), stroke volume, and cardiac output.

P wave and QRS duration were measured from SAECG.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Chewing Gum, Echocardiography, Electrocardiography, Ganglionic Stimulants, Heart, Hemodynamics and Nicotine.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2002 (Echocardiography (Mount Kisco, N.Y.)), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.