Gum, Patches and Medication Success Rates?

[WildChild]

Hi all,

I've been a long-time vaper and I'm excited to join your community.

I'm currently working on a project showing the success/quit rates for NRTs and smoking cessation products and comparing them to average success rates people are seeing when switching from analogs to e-cigs. I'm being very careful to use correct terminology and to make no claims about "quitting" with e-cigs. I'm hoping somebody can direct me toward sources with factual quit rates for nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, inhalers, Chantix, Wellbutrin and cold turkey. I've been doing a ton of research and have only found a few solid stats at:

Nicotine Patches, Gums, and Quit-Smoking Drugs
Chantix ~ 33%
Wellbutrin ~ 24%
A Comparison of the Nicotine Lozenge and Nicotine Gum An Effectiveness Randomized Controlled Trial
Lozenge ~ 15.1%
Gum ~ 11.3%

However the numbers are a little shaky and each source I find contradicts others. I was kind of expecting to find some sort of chart showing all of the different success rates based on studies but I'm having little luck. I'm surprised the FDA keeps claiming there isn't enough data to show that e-cigs are a successful method for quitting cigarettes when I'm finding a lot more studies and numbers for that than other methods.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice!

 

[manuelpt]

5 years using gums with no sucess, almost all the time smoking and using gums.

 

[hvac999]

I wish I could remember where I saw the study but, I saw this before starting to vape, showing that vaping had a 50% stop rate at 6 months. This was for people that ended up stopping vaping after stopping analogs at 6 months.

 

[WildChild]

I'm currently trying to decipher this report - http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/userfiles/ccoch/file/World No Tobacco Day/CD000146.pdf

But it looks like it may be getting at what I'm looking for. It averages the results of many different studies. I'm assuming "RR" stands for "response rate"? If so, the results are pretty pathetic:

Any NRT: 1.58%
Nicotine gum: 1.43%
Nicotine patch: 1.9%
Tablets/lozenges: 2%
Nasal spray: 2.02%

Anybody know if I'm interpreting this correctly?

 

[neonballoon]

Those percentages are really low, they barely get close to 5% on any of those. You might want to check Chantix also as it's new medication that's supposed to be like 40% success rate. With the e-cigs, I've read statistics that was more than 75%.

 

[WildChild]

Those percentages are really low, they barely get close to 5% on any of those. You might want to check Chantix also as it's new medication that's supposed to be like 40% success rate. With the e-cigs, I've read statistics that was more than 75%.

Yeah those numbers do seem really low. Maybe "RR" stands for something else. I wish it was just in plain english! I keep seeing other articles state around 11-13% for gum and patches but I can't find the source for those claims...

WebMD does have stats for Chantix and Wellbutrin (Zyban) which I put in my first post.

 

[akatina]

I'm currently trying to decipher this report - http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/userfiles/ccoch/file/World No Tobacco Day/CD000146.pdf

But it looks like it may be getting at what I'm looking for. It averages the results of many different studies. I'm assuming "RR" stands for "response rate"? If so, the results are pretty pathetic:

Any NRT: 1.58%
Nicotine gum: 1.43%
Nicotine patch: 1.9%
Tablets/lozenges: 2%
Nasal spray: 2.02%

Anybody know if I'm interpreting this correctly?

According to the study RR is risk ratio.

EDIT TO ADD:
Per the study

Main results
We identified 132 trials; 111 with over 40,000 participants contributed to the primary comparison between any type of NRT and a placebo or non-NRT control group. The RR of abstinence for any form of NRT relative to control was 1.58 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.50 to 1.66). The pooled RR for each type were 1.43 (95% CI: 1.33 to 1.53, 53 trials) for nicotine gum; 1.66 (95% CI: 1.53 to 1.81, 41 trials) for nicotine patch; 1.90 (95% CI: 1.36 to 2.67, 4 trials) for nicotine inhaler; 2.00 (95% CI: 1.63 to 2.45, 6 trials) for oral tablets/lozenges; and 2.02 (95% CI: 1.49 to 3.73, 4 trials) for nicotine nasal spray. The effects were largely independent of the duration of therapy, the intensity of additional support provided or the setting in which the NRT was offered. The effect was similar in a small group of studies that aimed to assess use of NRT obtained without a prescription. In highly dependent smokers there was a significant benefit of 4 mg gum compared with 2 mg gum, but weaker evidence of a benefit from higher doses of patch. There was evidence that combining a nicotine patch with a rapid delivery form of NRT was more effective than a single type of NRT. Only one study directly compared NRT to another pharmacotherapy. In this study quit rates with nicotine patch were lower than with the antidepressant bupropion.

Authors’ conclusions
All of the commercially available forms of NRT (gum, transdermal patch, nasal spray, inhaler and sublingual tablets/lozenges) can help people who make a quit attempt to increase their chances of successfully stopping smoking. NRTs increase the rate of quitting by 50-70%, regardless of setting. The effectiveness of NRT appears to be largely independent of the intensity of additional support provided to the individual. Provision of more intense levels of support, although beneficial in facilitating the likelihood of quitting, is not essential to the success of NRT.

I did the whole underline-italic-bold part because this pretty much has to be a reference to e-cigs, wouldn't you agree?

 

[WildChild]

You may be right. Obviously you don't need a prescription for gum, patches or lozenges but those would have been covered by the other studies.

So basically they compiled all of this info and dedicated over 20 pages to "outcomes" but they don't even show success rates, and all I can pull from it is that "NRT's increase the rate of quitting by 50-70%, regardless of setting"? Seems like a big waste of time.

 

[budynbuick]

I went on the patch. Well, I saved a bunch of the spent ones & one morning I had my shirt off sitting in my recliner with about 15 of them suckers stuck all over my torso/chest when my wife got up & came in the room.........With sleep in her eyes & not expecting such a sight Now, on a pos note, I did cut down to two PAD. I went a couple days without a smoke & thought I would lose my mind! The gum was even less effective. My SIL/BIL(pill)would have night terrors,Personality changes & wet farts

 

[WildChild]

Maybe I need to take some more statistics classes.

If you look, for example, on page 133 of http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/userfiles/ccoch/file/World No Tobacco Day/CD000146.pdf - in the second column titled "Nicotine gum n/N" could those numbers be abstinent/non-abstinent? If so, I could do my own math to get averages. It appears this document is only comparing the outcomes of using NRTs vs. control groups.

Thanks for everyone's input!