Top Stories - Posted by David Orenstein-Brown on Monday, May 23, 2011 11:34 - 5 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Exercise stops nicotine cravings (briefly)
For years researchers have found that exercise can curb nicotine cravings, but have struggled to show a practical benefit in trials. Newly published research suggests a reason: The effect is too ephemeral. (Credit: iStockphoto)
BROWN U. (US) — Exercise can curb the nicotine cravings of women smokers, but a new study suggests the effect is short-lived.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“What we found is that although there is no chronic effect of exercise on cigarette cravings and affective withdrawal symptoms, there is an acute effect that diminishes over a period of several hours to 1-2 days, but can be renewed with each bout of exercise,” says David Williams, an assistant professor of community health at Brown University and first author of the study published in the journal Addictive Behaviors.
“One implication for these findings is that exercise may be a useful treatment strategy, but it has to be done frequently enough and consistently enough because the effects that it has diminish over time.”
To conduct their pilot study, Williams and colleagues at the Miriam Hospital, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and St. George University of London signed up 60 female smokers for an 8-week regimen of smoking cessation treatment. They were all given quitting counseling and nicotine patches. Half were assigned to the exercise group, in which they briskly walked on a treadmill at the study center for 50 minutes three times a week. The 30 women in the control group watched 30-minute health and wellness videos three times a week.
For each group the researchers asked them about their mood and cigarette cravings immediately before and after each session. They also asked them again when they reached their next destination after each exercise or wellness session.
The researchers found that, relative to participants in the control group, those who exercised were more likely to experience improved mood and decreased cigarette cravings, but that these effects dissipated by the time of their next exercise session. On one hand, the improvements in affect and cravings are encouraging, Williams says, but clearly it wasn’t sustained even over a matter of a few days.
The next step, he says, is to enroll a larger sample of women in a randomized, controlled trial. That work is well under way because in February his pilot research led to a new 5-year National Institutes of Health grant to study the issue in further detail. The study will allow him and his team to provide enrolled women with electronic devices where they can record their cravings and mood more frequently.
Once Williams has a better sense of when the effects of exercise wear off, he’ll know how frequent exercise needs to be to sustain its anti-craving benefit.
The National Institutes of Health funded the research.
More news from Brown University: http://news.brown.edu/
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5 Comments
The bottom line is exercise should be an important part of everyone’s life as it has so many health benefits.
Exercise and Nutrition Tips
I found this to be an interesting article. I never smoked, but my mother did consuming two-and-a-half packs of Camels until she died a terrible death from cancer at 70.
Interesting, Dr. O. I had no idea that addictive residuals lasted in the body that long.
Deboul Kim
If you have kept yourself up to date with what is going on around the world, I’m sure you are aware that we are currently facing a health epidemic. Research has shown that there has been a 95% increase in the number of teens who are obese and suffering from various diseases. The main cause to individuals being overweight has mainly been sourced down to the desserts that they eat.
Why was this study conducted only with women? Also, was there an evaluation performed to determine their desire to stop smoking?
Point of interest. Nicotine is the most addictive agent in tobacco but it is essentially flushed out of the sysyem in about a week or so. However, the other addictive agents, collectively called ‘tars’, flush out more slowly at the rate of about one a month. This creates a desire to smoke that is more subtle but can be just as compelling. The system may not be clean for over a year. This is why many stop smoking systems fail after months of success.