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Jack E. Henningfield, PhD

JAMA. 1988;260(11):1613-1614.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

The study by Killen and colleagues¹ published in this issue of JAMA may lead to improved diagnosis and treatment of nicotine dependence. Their findings extend those of the Surgeon General² and indicate that level of nicotine dependence is a determinant of the severity of withdrawal symptoms and difficulty in quitting smoking. These kinds of observations are shared with other drug dependencies.

Killen and colleagues compared a variety of measures of nicotine withdrawal symptoms and smoking cessation difficulty in light and heavy smokers in a treatment study. Whether the person smoked fewer than 16 cigarettes per day or more than 24 cigarettes per day accounted for approximately 80% of the variance in severity of withdrawal symptoms; these cutoff values were indicative of weak or strong withdrawal symptoms, respectively. Factors such as the number of years a person had smoked, the age at which he or she started, the nicotine . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Addiction Research Center National Institute on Drug Abuse The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore

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