Researchers have found that drug cytisine is a low-cost an appealing alternative to newer stop-smoking medications, USA Today reported Sunday. Over the course of a year, researchers found cytisine, a nicotine substitute, more effective than a placebo in helping smokers stop the habit. “The key feature of this drug is that it is extremely cheap and so affordable by just about anyone in the world who can afford to smoke,” said lead researcher Robert West, from the Health Behaviour Research Center at University College London in England. Cytisine, sold as Tabex in former socialist economy countries for four decades, has now been shown to be an effective and safe way of helping smokers quit, West added. But it does not have US Food and Drug Administration approval, so it is not available in the United States. The drug is extracted from the Cytisus laborinum L. (Golden Rain acacia) plant, and as a smoking-cessation aid it is similar to nicotine replacement drugs such as Chantix, patches and gums. In Poland, where the study was done, cytisine costs $15 for a course of treatment, the researchers noted. In China, an 8-week course of nicotine-replacement therapy costs $230; an 8-week course of Zyban (bupropion) costs $123 and a 12-week course of Chantix (vareniclene) costs $327, while a pack of cigarettes typically costs 73 cents and sometimes much less, they said. About 5 million people globally die prematurely from smoking each year, the study authors noted. The study, published in the Sept. 29 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, was largely paid for by Britain's publicly funded National Prevention Research Initiative.
