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Kicking the Nicotine Habit by Kim Carlyle |
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A room full of smokers
is a tough place to be if you’re trying to quit.
It also may be just what you need.
Therapists sometimes devise role-playing scenarios to teach addicts how to cope — and how to
refuse an offer.
“Research has shown that real-life cues lead to arousal and cravings, but it is not feasible or
ethical to take addicted persons to some real-life environments like bars or parties,” said
Patrick Bordnick, a University of Georgia social work professor who studies addiction and
withdrawal.
Role-playing therapy has its limits, too.
“Up to 75 percent of smokers who are in therapy trying to quit will relapse,” said Ken Graap,
CEO of the Atlanta clinic Virtually Better. “It is not terribly effective for patients to role play
when the person who was their therapist two minutes ago is now supposed to be a fellow smoker at a
party offering them a cigarette.”
So Bordnick and Graap collaborated on a technological solution: a virtual reality (VR)
environment to treat people addicted to nicotine. The VR program, funded by a grant from the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, aims to determine if virtual cues, just like real cues, can lead
to cravings.
To test this, Bordnick and Graap are asking study participants to smoke cigarettes; the
researchers then measure changes in craving and physiology among smokers during exposure to three
virtual environments: a neutral room with no smoking-related stimuli, a room containing smoking
paraphernalia and a virtual party that integrates the VR world with films of people smoking.
“Initially, we need to understand whether smokers respond to the VR smoking stimuli,” said
Bordnick, who believes “the virtual situations containing filmed people smoking are where the real
progress is being made.”
Craving is measured subjectively by asking smokers questions and physiologically by measuring
heart rate, respiration and skin response.
Drug cravings — believed to be a factor related to relapse and continued use — can be triggered
years after abstinence by something as simple as exposure to a particular environment or certain
cues.
Virtual environments will help researchers better understand cravings and ways to minimize
them. Ultimately, the researchers plan to assess the success of agents that purport to reduce
nicotine cravings combined with behavioral cessation therapies.
“Before we developed this virtual environment, there was no scientific way to generalize cue
reactivity’ research results,” Bordnick said. “Different researchers would get different
reactions and no one could be sure if it was due to variance in environment, demographics,
treatment or what.”
For more information, contact Patrick Bordnick at
678-407-5517, bordnick@uga.edu.
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Research
Communications, Office of the VP for Research, UGA
For comments or for information please e-mail the editor: jbp@ovpr.uga.edu To contact the webmaster please email: ovprweb@uga.edu
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