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Small Vitamin B shots are given at a couple of acupuncture points near the nose and on the earlobes. The injections stimulate these acupuncture sites and thereby produce their effects (which patients report as a decreased craving), thus helping you to get through the critical early phase when you?re most likely to go back to your cigarettes. If you feel squeamish about the shots hurting, we also have a topical anesthetic cream to help.

Patients have had remarkable success with some stop smoking injections, and it is generally considered a one-time treatment. However, a repeat injection can be provided later if you feel yourself gravitating back to the desire to smoke.

We request that you return to see us for a follow up visit with your doctor in two weeks, and we may call you periodically to see how you?re doing.

American pharmaceutical companies are on the phone regularly, enquiring whether the Universiteit Maastricht could do a study in the field of 'giving up smoking'.

There is one going on right now: an American company wants to work together with the UM to develop a vaccine that will make the physical addiction a thing of the past with a single injection. At the moment, a trainee assistant is investigating whether giving up smoking would be easier with the aid of antidepressants.

At the same time, there are quite a few people at the UM, such as the director of education at Arts and Culture, who regard themselves as contented chain smokers. A staff manager at Health Sciences wanted to quit, stopped, knitted until her fingers fell off, started smoking again, and gave up smoking for good last week.

Something that undoubtedly a lot of smokers would be interested in is a vaccine that would cure their physical addiction in one shot. It sounds futuristic, but (perhaps) it is not. At this moment Van Schayck is involved in negotiations with an American company concerning the development such a vaccine.

The Americans ended up with the UM, he says, because it has the greatest expertise in this field in Europe, especially in the departments of Health Information, GP Medicine, Lung Diseases, and Health Risk Analysis and Toxicology. Parties are currently working on a protocol, after which the Ethical Committee will have to agree, because healthy volunteers will be used as test subjects.

How does such a vaccine work? Nicotine is a molecule that very quickly reaches the brain once it has entered the bloodstream. Because the molecule is so small, it easily slips past the so-called blood-brain-barrier.

That is where it comes in contact with nicotine receptors, causing the release of dopamine. It is this substance that causes the feeling of satisfaction. The vaccine contains a protein that attaches itself to nicotine, making it too large to slip through the blood-brain-barrier. As a result, no dopamine is released.

American experiments on rats and guinea pigs have been successful. The first injection is followed by a second one a few weeks later; after a few months, subjects receive a so-called booster, which is like a powerful repeat. The animal tests have shown that this is enough to eliminate physical yearning for a few years.

The idea is brilliant, but it is quite a job to create a protein that does not have any side effects. We think that smokers who have been freed from the physical addiction will find it easier to stop smoking.

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