If you are a heavy smoker, you are probably aware of the body’s addiction to smoking cigarettes and nicotine cravings.The decision to cut down on smoking or control the habit would help your health to improve drastically. There are several products to help you with this although the stop smoking vaccine that stops you smoking because you no longer get a kick from the nicotine is becoming a reality.The Swiss biotechnology company Cytos which develops products to treat nicotine addiction developed the stop smoking vaccine.

How does the stop smoking vaccine work you might wonder.Well the vaccine employs part of a protein that trigger an immune response to the chemical nicotine.Therefore, the formed antibodies stick to the nicotine molecules to stop them from reaching the brain.As there is no kick from the administered nicotine, the craving to smoke reduces making it much easier for chronic smokers to quit the habit.

In the study conducted by Prof. Dr. Jacques Cornuz of University Hospital Lausanne, revealed that 57% of smokers who received the stop smoking vaccine achieved high levels of antibodies against nicotine. After the smokers received the stop smoking vaccine, they stopped smoking completely for at least six months. A fascinating fact is that 31% of those people who received a dummy stop smoking vaccine also happened to quit smoking.Even 33% of the individuals who developed lower antibody levels quit smoking.

However, there are some minor side effects of the stop smoking vaccine that is redness and tenderness at the injection site while some experienced flu-like symptoms but that was resolved within 24 hours.

The actual percentage of those who truly manage to stop smoking is very low although many chronic smokers try desperately to quit the habit.Many of them attempt nicotine replacement therapy, counseling and sometimes antidepressants but only one in every 20 smokers succeeds in quitting in the long run.

There are a number of other companies that are also looking into the development of a vaccine for smoking aside from Cytos and they are the Xenova Group, Nabi Biopharmaceuticals and Prommune. The vaccine to stop smoking may just be the truly revolutionary product we were looking for that allows the chronic smoker to stop smoking for good and in turn increase the number of individuals who stopped smoking completely.

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