Medicinal Benefits of Nicotine.

[swestrup]

According to this article, the nicotine in tobacco has only ever been studied for its addictive effects, despite the fact that tobacco was originally introduced to the new world as a medicine. In fact, it may have many medicinal uses, now that someone has started looking into it.

Comments

[electricland.livejournal.com]

er... well, I just did a Medline search and came up with 2845 entries under the MeSH headings "Nicotine/administration & dosage" and "therapeutic use" -- and Medline only goes back as far as 1966. So I wouldn't call it new, exactly.

(There are 795 entries for "therapeutic use" alone, again dating back to 1966.)

FWIW.

[swestrup]

Thanks for the info. I took the article at face value when it said the substance had gone unstudied for therapeutic uses.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Still a good article though! And it's certainly fair to say that the research seems to have stepped up a lot of late.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

I didn't think the article implied that the study of nicotine was new, except in the first paragraph, as an attention getter. I was looking for that in the article, because of what you wrote. I remembered reading an article about the therapeutic use of nicotine, about a year ago that said, "Good drug; bad delivery system". Here it is.

I think the bibliography in that article would tend to indicate that they didn't think it was a completely new area of research.

[swestrup]

Yeah, I noticed that afterwards. I got 3 or 4 almost identical copies of the report, and one copy I had only in text form started by saying that it hadn't been studied for therapeutic use. I often have the problem that I get a text or html copy of an article from a magazine and am unwilling to post it verbatim, or its no longer freely available from the source the article came from. I then use google to find a copy of the same article for free online and post a pointer to it.

In this case I think the opening comments I read were an editorial aside from whoever submitted the article to the mailinglist, although that was certainly unclear from the article.