Molecular Genetics of Successful Smoking Cessation

Abstract

Cigarette smoking continues to contribute substantially to US morbidity and mortality, despite increasingly stringent public health measures that make it more difficult and expensive to smoke.¹ Smokers may thus now include many who have considerable difficulty in achieving sustained abstinence from tobacco, despite the availability of therapeutic drugs that act at sites that include nicotinic receptors and monoamine transporters.² Understanding the mechanisms that facilitate or impede smokers' abilities to achieve and sustain abstinence from smoking could thus inform a major current US public health problem and augment understanding of mnemonic and other brain mechanisms that might influence abstinence.³ Understanding mechanisms that contribute to the abstinence-enhancing efficacies of specific therapeutic drugs could help match smokers with treatments that would be more likely to be effective for them.