Efficacy and safety of an over-the-counter transdermal nicotine patch as an aid for smoking cessation

What Was Tested

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

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 802 adults were involved.

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

A smoking history of at least 20 cigarettes per day for 1 year and a score of 5 (on a 10-point scale) on a motivational assessment questionnaire were required for enrollment.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and multicenter study.

The adults 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 adults 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.

Running at several centres spread the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study over different clinics and patient groups.

The timeline in the abstract includes 1 year.

Multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of 6-week duration with 18 weeks of follow-up.

Poststudy follow-up was limited to those who had quit smoking at the end of 6 weeks.

Nicotine patches were provided at the shopping mall.

Guidance consisted only of package instructions and a smoking cessation self-help booklet.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Administration, Cutaneous, Nicotine, Nicotinic Agonists, Nonprescription Drugs 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 802 adults over 1 year.

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 8 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 1998 (Archives of family medicine), a journal based in United States.

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