One of the latest findings about smoking is that it is never too late to quit. This therefore reduced the health risks experienced at all ages and the moment he abandons the habit. Self-help groups and drug treatments are good allies.
According to research units Clinical Trials and Epidemiological Studies of the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford (England), published in the British medical journal British Medical Journal, people who quit smoking (including those of 50 or 60 years) avoid large measure the risks of developing lung cancer: Moreover, if the smoker quits at an early age, prevents 90 percent of the risks associated with snuff.
What, then, the risks for the health benefits of smoking? According to statistics from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), smoking is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide, causing more deaths than AIDS, traffic accidents, violence and alcohol and illicit drugs combined. Smoking is the major risk factor of heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases and cancer and has demonstrated its link with at least 52 diseases.
Teamwork
One of the therapeutic alternatives that may appeal to those who want to quit but can not alone are the self-help groups that work specifically on the topic of smoking. In these groups, usually coordinated by former smokers, worked and shared with team members to the various difficulties experienced by each of the concurrent cessation.
The support group and the tactics and strategies that provide the coordinators provide a social safety net and the necessary weapons to cope with this company. The LALCEC self-help groups in Argentina are examples.
In LALCEC work with emphasis on the psychological. Something happens to the cigarette smoker, and those who accompany the abandonment of addiction attempt to discover what personality fissure was left on the cigarette can not shut down. There are cigarettes that are harder to leave than others, the easiest to make are as a person smokes when she sees someone smoking. But there are others, “holed up” with other meanings for the smoker.
Infighting against nicotine
The pharmacological treatment of smoking is generally reserved for those who have tried to quit and can not. If a person decides to quit and can not do it alone, then you can use self-help groups, if I could still achieve its mission to stop this unhealthy habit, there is a last line of containment that is pharmacological treatment.
The need for alternative pharmacological smoking cessation is explained by the fact that, as argued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States, smoking is the most toxic and addictive vehicle for the administration of a drug whose effects are often underestimated by the tobacco industry: nicotine.
This is an addictive substance threefold: it generates a unit sign, and repeated countless times that the action of smoking a cigarette it becomes an automatic mechanism, a physical dependence, while the nicotine becomes a need for the agency and mental, related to the ability to regulate mood of the person who does the nicotine in a smoker.
That’s why when the latter quit, if only for a few hours, you experience the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal: irritability, frustration, anger, anxiety, increased appetite, impaired cognitive ability and reduced heart rate. And these symptoms are precisely those that push back the cigarette smoker. Often it is the smoker’s family which leads him to start smoking again, preferring the cigarette having to endure her mood swings.
The pharmacological treatment of smoking is based on two pillars: the nicotine replacement therapy and psychotropic drugs. The nicotine replacement is used when the patient has a major addiction, while psychotropic serve to regulate the person’s mood and soothe the withdrawal that do not ease the nicotine replacement therapy.
Like all drugs, nicotine substitutes drug is given by is not safe, warns Verra, produces an increase in heart rate, vasoconstriction and oxygen consumption, but nevertheless these treatments do not usually last more than 2 or 3 months, and offer a high probability of success: about 60% quit smoking once treatment is finished, and 45% still not smoking after one year.
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