Preliminary findings on the interactive effects of IV ethanol and IV nicotine on human behavior and cognition: a laboratory study.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

The main objective of this study was to characterize the interactive effects of acute intravenous (IV) alcohol and nicotine administration on behavior and cognition in healthy nonsmokers.

Why It Was Studied

There are mixed reports on nicotine's effects on alcohol-induced impairment in cognitive performance and behavior in humans.

Who Took Part

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

Healthy subjects aged 21-44 years participated in 3 test days.

Subjective effects of alcohol were measured using the Biphasic Alcohol Effects Scale and the Number of Drinks Scale.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

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

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

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

Alcohol infusion was delivered over 20 min and lasted for 120 min.

They also received both placebo and active nicotine in a fixed order delivered intravenously.

Cognitive inhibition and attention were measured by the Continuous Performance Task-Identical Pairs and working memory by the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Task (RAVLT).

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Cognition, Ethanol 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 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2012 (Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco), a journal based in England.

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