In hopes to quit smoking, more and more people are turning to the new and highly controversial smoking cessation drug Chantix.

These folks do not want to trade their cigarettes for suicidal or homicidal thoughts, depression,  erratic behavior - and most certainly not death.

However, after 5157 complaints in just one week, involving the above listed symptoms, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is now looking into this to determine if the drug is really safe.

Chantix sales for the 3rd quarter in 2007 were $241 million (!), up from $33 million a year earlier. With that much revenue at stake the saga will no doubt continue… - Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

Complaints about the drug Chantix continue to mount.

The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that they are now investigating whether the stop smoking medication is safe.

Now News 8 has learned the number and type of side effects might be far greater and more deadly than previously reported.

Over the last two months, Ryann Rathbone said she has received countless e-mails from people thanking her for bringing attention to the possible side effects of Chantix.

"We’ve had people who have e-mailed me that I don’t know telling me about their depression or their aggression on it, or their boyfriend’s aggression on Chantix," she said.

Rathbone’s musician boyfriend, Carter Albrecht, was killed in September after being shot by a neighbor during what she described as a violent hallucination prompted by the drug.

After an initial report on Albrecht’s death, News 8 requested, through the Freedom of Information Act, all the complaints filed with the FDA about Chantix. A computer disc was sent with 5,157 complaints, which were all filed in just one week after the News 8 report aired.

Suicide was reported 55 times. Suicidal thoughts were mentioned in 199 cases and 417 people complained of depression.

There were hundreds of mentions of anger, aggression, amnesia, hallucination and homicidal thoughts.

In California, Chad Huber was arrested after an allegedly unprovoked bar fight. His wife said the father of 6-year-old twins was never violent until starting Chantix.

An FDA spokesperson confirmed they are looking into 100 specific psychotic incidents in the United States.

Even before Albrecht’s death, the FDA said they had planned an investigation based on complaints in Europe where Pfizer sold the drug as Champix since 2006.

Rathbone said it all reinforces her commitment to warn Chantix users to beware and be aware.

"Not just the people who are taking the drug need to be aware," she said. "I think their friends, their family, their coworkers [and] everyone needs to look for behavioral or mood changes."

She said she hopes to save others from the grief she continues to endure.

The FDA is urging doctors to carefully monitor patients on the drug. People should also report side effects to the FDA.

Source

Only 2 days after the news that MRIs show that secondhand smoke causes lung damage in non-smokers (click here for my blog on that), an alarming rise of COPD cases in Women who smoke hit the media.

C.O.P.D., or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is a particularly scary and incurable -but treatable- lung disease that 20% of smokers will develop. It is crucial to stop smoking as early as possible - and definitely once symptoms like persisting shortness of breath and/or cough with or without phlegm, wheezing, or decreased exercise tolerance begin.

The only true prevention of COPD is avoidance of smoking. Smoking Cessation as well as early recognition and treatment may prevent progression of the disease. - Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

For Jean Rommes, the crisis came five years ago, on a Monday morning when she had planned to go to work but wound up in the hospital, barely able to breathe. She was 59, the president of a small company in Iowa. Although she had quit smoking a decade earlier, 30 years of cigarettes had taken their toll.

Ms. Rommes has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., a progressive illness that permanently damages the lungs and is usually caused by smoking. Once thought of as an old man’s disease, this disorder has become a major killer in women as well, the consequence of a smoking boom in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

The death rate in women nearly tripled from 1980 to 2000, and since 2000, more women than men have died or been hospitalized every year because of the disease.

“Women started smoking in what I call the Virginia Slims era, when they started sponsoring sporting events,” said Dr. Barry J. Make, a lung specialist at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. “It’s now just catching up to them.”

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease actually comprises two illnesses: one, emphysema, destroys air sacs deep in the lungs; the other, chronic bronchitis, causes inflammation, congestion and scarring in the airways. The disease kills 120,000 Americans a year, is the fourth leading cause of death and is expected to be third by 2020.

About 12 million Americans are known to have it, including many who have long since quit smoking, and studies suggest that 12 million more cases have not been diagnosed. Half the patients are under 65. The disease has left some 900,000 working-age people too sick to work and costs $42 billion a year in medical bills and lost productivity.

“It’s the largest uncontrolled epidemic of disease in the United States today,” said Dr. James Crapo, a professor at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center.

Experts consider the statistics a national disgrace. They say chronic lung disease is misdiagnosed, neglected, improperly treated and stigmatized as self-induced, with patients made to feel they barely deserve help, because they smoked. The disease is mired in a bog of misconception and prejudice, doctors say. It is commonly mistaken for asthma, especially in women, and treated with the wrong drugs.

Although incurable, it is treatable, but many patients, and some doctors, mistakenly think little can be done for it. As a result, patients miss out on therapies that could help them feel better and possibly live longer. The therapies vary, but may include drugs, exercise programs, oxygen and lung surgery.

Incorrectly treated, many fall needlessly into a cycle of worsening illness and disability, and wind up in the emergency room over and over again with pneumonia and other exacerbations — breathing crises like the one that put Ms. Rommes in the hospital — that might have been averted.

“Patients often come to me with years of being under treated,” said Dr. Byron Thomashow, the director of the Center for Chest Disease at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital.

Still others are overtreated for years with steroids like prednisone, which is meant for short-term use and if used too much can thin the bones, weaken muscles and raise the risk of cataracts.

Adequate treatment means drugs, usually inhaled, that open the airways and quell inflammation — preventive medicines that must be used daily, not just in emergencies. It is essential to quit smoking.

Patients also need antibiotics to fight lung infections, vaccines to prevent flu and pneumonia and lessons on special breathing techniques that can help them make the most of their diminished lungs. Some need oxygen, which can help them be more active and prolong life in severe cases.

Many need dietary advice: obesity can worsen symptoms, but some with advanced disease lose so much weight that their muscles begin to waste. Some people with emphysema benefit from surgery to remove diseased parts of their lungs.

Above all, patients need exercise, because shortness of breath drives many to become inactive, and they become increasingly weak, homebound, disabled and depressed. Many could benefit from therapy programs called pulmonary rehabilitation, which combine exercise with education about the disease, drugs and nutrition, but the programs are not available in all parts of the country, and insurance coverage for them varies.

Source

And yet another health professional states that electronic cigarettes are not an ideal tool for smoking cessation. They may even do more harm than good and actually encourage smoking!

That makes perfect sense, as you will not instill the desire to stop smoking in someone while they keep the habit of putting the cigarette between their lips and sucking on it throughout the day. I have been telling my clients this since the beginning of the public debate about using electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation.

Here is what Professor Tuncer, of the Turkish Fight Against Cancer Department, has to say about this. - Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

The Chairman of the Turkish Fight Against Cancer Department, Professor Murat Tuncer, sent a warning to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, for licensing the stop smoking product, and to the stores which distribute them.

The electronic cigarette, which is the same size as a real cigarette, displaying identical physical characteristics, and has been put on the market has become an issue of debate. Many celebrities, such as Fatih Terim and Yılmaz Erdoğan are sporting electronic cigarettes.

However, the Chairman of the Fight Against Cancer Department Professor Murat Tuncer described the electronic cigarette as being an encouragement for the real thing. Tuncer said: "electronic cigarettes encourage the behavior of smokers. It affects social behavior in a negative way. This is a form of publicity for real cigarettes."

Source

Do you smoke at home, around your spouse and children? Do you need another good reason to quit smoking?

I remember when in June of 2006 the Surgeon General released the number of secondhand smoke deaths in the US for the year prior (2005). It was around 50.000 people that year!! And again, that is in the United States alone! These are folks who never smoked in their lives, and who either lived with a heavy smoker, or who worked in a smoke filled environment.

So, if you smoke in your house and have a family and kids living with you, read this brandnew article on MRIs showing that secondhand smoke damages lungs. Here’s another really strong reason to get help and stop smoking now! - Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s smoking-related, and it’s there in bright medical images: evidence of microscopic structural damage deep in the lungs, caused by secondhand cigarette smoke. For the first time, researchers have identified lung injury to nonsmokers that was long suspected, but not previously detectable with medical imaging tools.

The researchers suggest that their findings may strengthen public health efforts to restrict secondhand smoke.

"We used a special type of magnetic resonance imaging to find these structural changes in the lungs," said study leader Chengbo Wang, Ph.D., a magnetic resonance physicist in the Department of Radiology at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

"Almost one-third of nonsmokers who had been exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke for a long time developed these structural changes." Formerly at the University of Virginia, Wang collaborated with radiology researchers at that institution, where they acquired the MRIs from adult smokers and nonsmokers.

Wang presented the team’s findings in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Although the participants in the research study were adults, Wang said the results have implications for the 35 percent of American children who live in homes where regular smoking occurs.

The researchers studied 60 adults between ages 41 and 79, 45 of whom had never smoked. The 45 non-smokers were divided into groups with low and high exposure to secondhand smoke; the high-exposure subjects had lived with a smoker for at least 10 years, often during childhood. The 15 current or former smokers formed a positive control group.

The research team prepared an isotope of helium called helium-3 by polarizing it to make it more visible in the MRI. Researchers diluted the helium in nitrogen and had research subjects inhale the mixture.

Unlike ordinary MRIs, this MRI machine measured diffusion, the movement of helium atoms, over 1.5 seconds. The helium atoms moved a greater distance than in the lungs of normal subjects, indicating the presence of holes and expanded spaces within the alveoli, tiny sacs within the lungs.

The researchers found that almost one-third of the non-smokers with high exposure to secondhand smoke had structural changes in their lungs similar to those found in the smokers.

"We interpreted those changes as early signs of lung damage, representing very mild forms of emphysema," said Wang. Emphysema, a lung disease that is a major cause of death in the U.S., is commonly found in heavy smokers.

The researchers also found a seemingly paradoxical result among two-thirds of the high-exposure group of non-smokers–diffusion measurements that were lower than those found in the low-exposure group.

Although these findings require more study, said Wang, they may reflect a narrowing in airways caused by early stages of another lung disease, chronic bronchitis.

"To our knowledge, this is the first imaging study to find lung damage in non-smokers heavily exposed to secondhand smoke," said Wang. "We hope our work strengthens the efforts of legislators and policymakers to limit public exposure to secondhand smoke."

The study received financial support from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, the Commonwealth of Virginia Technology Research Fund, and Siemens Medical Solutions.

Wang’s co-authors were Talissa A. Altes, M.D., and Kai Ruppert, Ph.D., now of the Children’s Hospital Radiology Department; and G. Wilson Miller, Ph.D., Eduard E. deLange, M.D., Jaime F. Mata, Ph.D., Gordon D. Cates, Jr., Ph.D., and John P. Mugler III, Ph.D., all of the University of Virginia Department of Radiology. Drs. Wang, Altes, and Ruppert were previously at the University of Virginia as well.

Adapted from materials provided by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Source

The single most successful solution to stop smoking is hypnosis. When facilitated by a well trained and experienced smoking cessation specialist, its success rates can be triple those of any other treatments or therapies to quit smoking that are available today.

The medical establishment is realizing this more and more. The vast majority of the  referrals to our offices these days confirm this fact, as they come from doctors and sometimes even hospitals. - Franc Tausch, PhD, CCHT

Scientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) are defining the most effective ways to treat tobacco dependence. They highlight the surprisingly significant role that the health practitioner can play in helping people quit smoking. Many people’s attempts to quit smoking are unsuccessful, so effective interventions are critical for smokers.

Research shows that since an estimated 70% of smokers visit a physician each year, family doctors have a substantial opportunity to influence smoking behaviour. "Even a short intervention (three minutes or less) can increase a person’s motivation to quit and can significantly increase abstinence rates," the authors write.

They provide an algorithm topped by the simple question "Are you smoking?" to help physicians integrate a patient’s smoking status and his or her readiness to quit.

This research article is published in the November issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Adapted from materials provided by Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Source