The effects of nicotine stimulus and response expectancies on male and female smokers' responses to nicotine-free electronic cigarettes.

What Was Tested

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

Who Took Part

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

Participants completed two randomized experimental sessions in which they administered a nicotine-free e-cigarette.

Participants completed subjective assessments before and immediately after sampling ten puffs from the e-cigarette and were then invited to earn additional puffs using a computerized progressive ratio task.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized 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.

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

This study examined the contributions of nicotine stimulus and response expectancies to responses to nicotine-free e-cigarettes in 21 e-cigarette naïve smokers (12 male).

During one session they were informed that the e-cigarette contained nicotine and during the other session they were informed that the e-cigarette was nicotine-free.

Prior to their enrolment in the study, participants provided an estimate of the relative importance of the nicotine content of e-cigarettes for craving relief.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Craving, Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, Nicotine, Nicotinic Agonists, Placebo Effect, Self Administration and Sex Factors.

Author keywords: Electronic cigarettes, Expectancy and Self-administration.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2015 (Addictive behaviors), a journal based in England.

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