Do cigarettes help smokers manage stress?

Published on December 16, 2008 3:07 AM

Many smokers claim that smoking relieves their feelings of stress. The stress they feel may just be one of the short-term symptoms of withdrawal. This means that smoking may reduce anxiety levels back to the level they would have been. To examine the effects of smoking cheap cigarettes on stress, Dr Marcus Munafo and his team at the University of Bristol, will be inducing short periods of subjective stress and anxiety in smokers. The study participants will be healthy cigarette smokers who inhale their first cigarette of the day within 60 minutes of waking up. Dr Munafo has been given a prestigious Young Investigator Award by NARSAD, the Mental Health Research Association in the United States, to carry out this research.

The breathing in air containing a higher concentration of carbon dioxide than normal, leads to short-term increases in subjective anxiety and stress. This is because inhaling air enriched with carbon dioxide activates a region of the brain, involved in the body’s stress response. Dr Munafo and his team have developed the inhalation of CO2 as a new method to test the response of smokers when smoking and when refraining from smoking. This project may lead to therapies to help relieve the depression and stress caused both by smoking and smoking withdrawal, and perhaps aid in smoking cessation. Dr Munafo said: “The CO2 inhalation method has proved to be a very reliable way of modelling stress and anxiety in a laboratory. This funding represents an exciting opportunity to look at the role that cigarette smoking plays in the response to stress”.

Constance E. Lieber, president emeritus of NARSAD, said: “The young scientists whom NARSAD chooses to support represent the very best in their respective areas of expertise and have been judged by our Scientific Council as having developed innovative and promising research programmes.” NARSAD made the Young Investigator Award to help the most promising scientists who are now entering research to generate pilot data necessary for obtaining larger grants.