The safety of transdermal nicotine as an aid to smoking cessation in patients with cardiac disease

What Was Tested

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

Transdermal nicotine therapy is widely used to aid smoking cessation, but there is uncertainty about its safety in patients with cardiac disease.

Who Took Part

The study group was 576 men.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial at 10 Veterans Affairs medical centers, the researchers randomly assigned 584 outpatients (of whom 576 were men) with at least one diagnosis of cardiovascular disease to a 10-week course of transdermal nicotine or placebo as an aid to smoking cessation.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

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

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

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Cutaneous, Analysis of Variance, Cardiovascular Diseases, Nicotine and Smoking Cessation.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) in 576 men.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

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 1996 (The New England journal of medicine), a journal based in United States.

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