Quitting smoking sets off a series of changes in the brain that Penn Medicine researchers say may better identify smokers who will start smoking again—a prediction that goes above and beyond today's clinical or behavioral tools for assessing relapse risk.
Reporting in a new study published this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, James Loughead, PhD, associate professor of Psychiatry, and Caryn Lerman, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry and director of Penn's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction, found that smokers who relapsed within seven days from their target quit date had specific disruptions in the brain's working memory system during abstinence that separated them from the group who successfully quit. Such neural activity—mainly a decrease in the part of the brain that supports self-control and a boost in the area that promotes an "introspective" state—could help distinguish successful quitters from those who fail at an earlier stage and serve as a potentially therapeutic target for novel treatments.
"This is the first time abstinence-induced changes in the working memory have been shown to accurately predict relapse in smokers," said senior author Lerman, who also serves as deputy director of Penn's Abramson Cancer Center.
The study's lead author, Loughead, said: "The neural response to quitting even after one day can give us valuable information that could inform new and existing personalized intervention strategies for smokers, which is greatly needed." Indeed, smoking in the U.S. is at an all-time low in adults; however, there are still 42 million Americans who do smoke, including teenagers and young adults.
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