geoffrey modest medical blogs

  The NY Times had a recent article on cytisine as an effective treatment for smoking cessation:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/well/quit-smoking-cytisine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb   they make a few well-substantiated points: -- it is pretty easy to stop smoking, the issue is maintaing abstinence (and 47%  of those who try to quit are smoking 1 year later:  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3723776/  ) -- cytisine was developed as a pill in Bulgaria in 1964 and has been used in Eastern Europe for 50 years for smoking cessation -- cytisine was approved in Canada in 2017 and Britain last year for smoking cessation -- there have been many scientific articles showing a great effect of cytisine in smoking cessation (several noted below), with a 2014 editorial by Nancy Rigotti referring to cytisine as “a tobacco treatment hiding in plain sight”:  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1412313 ...

  e-cigarettes may help with smoking cessation (see  smoking cessation ecigs NEJM2024  in dropbox, or  DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2308815)   Details : -- 1246 participants participated in this open-label, controlled trial of adults who smoked at least 5 cigarettes per day for at least 12 months and wanted to quit within 3 months. This was a Swiss study with 5 sites, with recruitment from July 2018 to June 2021 -- patients were recruited through free and paid advertisements in the lay press and on social media, and by advertising in healthcare facilities and on public transport -- exclusion criteria included pregnant or breast-feeding women, as well as people who used nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) or other smoking cessation drug or e-cigarettes in the prior three months -- all participants were asked to specify a target quit date and then had a baseline visit scheduled a week before that date -- participants were also invited to an in-person clinic visit 6 mont...