Nicotine deprivation and pilot performance during simulated flight.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Most airlines enforce no-smoking policies, potentially causing flight performance decrements in pilots who are smokers.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults, adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, placebo-controlled and pilot study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) could be set against what happens without it.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study would be practical.

There were 29 pilots, regular smokers, who were tested in a Frasca 141 flight simulator on two 13-h test days, each including three 75-min flights (0 hr, 6 hr, 12 hr) in a randomized, controlled trial.

On the first day (baseline), all pilots smoked one cigarette per hour.

On the second day, pilots were randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) nicotine cigarettes; (2) nicotine gum; (3) placebo gum; (4) no cigarettes/no gum.

Flight Summary Scores (FSS) were compared between groups with repeated measures ANOVAs.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Aerospace Medicine, Chewing Gum, Nicotine, Nicotinic Agonists and Substance Withdrawal Syndrome.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 3 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2010 (Aviation, space, and environmental medicine), a journal based in United States.

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