Nicotine patches used in combination with e-cigarettes (with and without nicotine) for smoking cessation: a pragmatic, randomised trial

What Was Tested

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

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Participants were recruited from the general population using national media advertising.

The researchers advised participants to use one patch daily, with e-cigarette use as and when necessary or desired.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and parallel-group 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.

Groups ran in parallel: each of the participants stayed in one arm throughout.

Participants and researchers were masked to e-liquid nicotine content.

The researchers offered 6 weeks of telephone-delivered behavioural support.

The primary outcome was exhaled carbon monoxide (CO)-verified continuous smoking abstinence 6 months after the agreed quit date.

Primary analysis was by intention to treat, with sensitivity analysis by per protocol, treatment adherence, varying CO cutoffs, and complete case analysis.

This paper presents the main analyses and is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02521662.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, Self Report, Smoking Cessation, Tobacco Use Cessation Devices and Vaping.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2020 (The Lancet. Respiratory medicine), a journal based in England.

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