Can Genetics Help in Treatment of Smoking Addiction?

Emmi      Tiili; Ari      Hirvonen

Abstract

Although the harmful health effects of smoking are well-known, roughly fifth of mankind is still smoking. Because quitting smoking is difficult mainly due to the addictive effect of nicotine, several attempts have been made to ease this in the smoking cessation process. These attempts have been complicated by existence of a substantial variability in the nicotine addiction and relapse times, shown to be attributable to both environmental and genetic factors. The new emerging means like personalized medicine are hoped to help in overcoming the obstacles caused by the inherited factors in the treatment of tobacco dependence. The personalized treatment of smokers would be cost-effective, safe from gratuitous medicine taking and would improve the success rate of long term abstinence, which all can be enabled by the means of genetic studies. The impact of genetic factors on individual response to smoking cessation treatments has therefore been of great interest during the recent years. The focus of these studies has been on relationship between candidate gene polymorphisms and individual differences in smoking behavior and ability to quit smoking, especially considering the impact of multiple genetic variants of some smoking-related pathway on both nicotine dependence and individual response to smoking cessation treatments. This expert review summarizes the present knowledge on the genetic factors in smoking addiction and the potential of this knowledge to advance the future smoking cessation actions.

Keywords: Genetic polymorphism, nicotine replacement therapy, personalized therapeutics, smoking addiction, tobacco smoke.

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