A participant in the smoking cessation program is receiving counseling at the Daejeon Yuseong District Health Center. Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) successfully identify new causes and candidate substances for treating withdrawal symptoms that hinder smoking cessation./Courtesy of News1

Smoking cessation is one of the common topics that smokers set as a New Year's resolution. It is not easy to succeed in quitting smoking solely through willpower. Domestic researchers have discovered the potential for developing a new drug to assist in smoking cessation.

A research team led by Im Hye-in, head researcher at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Brain Disease Research Group, announced on the 8th that they have discovered a brain area that regulates cigarette withdrawal symptoms.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the global smoking rate exceeds 22%. Countries around the world are operating smoking cessation programs to lower their smoking rates. However, more than 9 million people still die each year due to smoking. The war against tobacco shows no signs of ending.

To successfully quit smoking, it is necessary to effectively control withdrawal symptoms caused by nicotine, which induces addiction. People attempting to quit smoking experience symptoms such as trembling hands and reduced activity as specific areas of the brain are activated. These withdrawal symptoms contribute to the lower success rate of quitting.

The KIST research team successfully identified the causes of withdrawal symptoms and developed a new treatment method to reduce these symptoms. Through experiments on mice, the researchers confirmed that cholinergic interneurons within the striatum affect withdrawal symptoms. The striatum is a brain area involved in reward, execution, self-regulation, and movement processing, receiving information from the cerebral cortex.

Cholinergic interneurons within the striatum were also found to be effective in suppressing withdrawal symptoms. When the researchers inhibited the sodium ion channels of cholinergic interneurons in the mice's striatum, neural activity decreased. As a result, the tremors associated with nicotine withdrawal significantly reduced, and abnormal changes in neural activity disappeared.

The research team also found new candidate substances for treating withdrawal symptoms. Procyclidine, which has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, has the potential to alleviate withdrawal symptoms by inhibiting the activity of cholinergic interneurons.

In mouse experiments, the research team administered procyclidine once and induced nicotine withdrawal symptoms. As a result, tremors were found to decrease by more than 50%. Since procyclidine has already been proven safe in clinical trials, it is expected that the clinical trial period for developing new smoking cessation treatments will be significantly shortened.

Researcher Im noted, "This presents new possibilities for smoking cessation treatment and highlights the significance of reducing disruptions to daily life caused by withdrawal and the potential for developing new treatments," adding that they will lead efforts to understand various addiction issues, including nicotine.

The research findings were introduced in the international academic journal "Advanced Science" on Nov. 4, 2024.

Reference materials

Advanced Science (2024), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202402274