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Medicines can double your chances of quitting - even though this is still a 20 per cent success rate at 12 months, rather than 10 per cent.

There are three types of pharmaceutical products to help you give up:

• Varenicline (Champix).
• Nicotine replacement therapy
• Buproprion (Zyban)

What is Champix?

Champix is a prescription-only medicine. Commenced in December 2006, the tablets include the active ingredient varenicline.

Varenicline works by:

• Exciting the same receptors in the brain as nicotine. This lessens the craving and removal symptoms that you can get when you stop smoking.
• Jamming nicotine’s action on these receptors. This means you won’t get any pleasurable effect from nicotine if you do have a cigarette.

Pros and cons

Like Zyban, Champix is a substitute to NRT and doesn’t include nicotine.

In clinical testing reported so far, more people have give up effectively with Champix than with Zyban. Champix has not yet been judged against to NRT.

On the negative side, some people found that after they stopped taking Champix:

• The push for  smoke returned
• They felt bad-tempered
• They felt disheartened
• They had sleeping difficulties.

Slowly but surely lowering the dose at the end of treatment may help to trim down these problems.

Like all medicines, Champix has side-effects, which may put some people off using it. There are also some people who aren’t appropriate for this type of treatment.

How to use Champix

• Champix is only accessible on prescription, so your GP will choose whether you are fit for treatment.
• As with Zyban, Champix must be used in combination with motivational hold up techniques.
• Champix tablets should be started one to two weeks prior to your aim stop date.
• The amount is increased steadily over the first week and the medicine is then taken twice a day for 12 weeks.
• If you have fruitfully managed to discontinue smoking at the end of 12 weeks, your doctor may offer you a further 12-week path of treatment. This has been shown to faintly increase the possibility of remaining smoke-free after one year.

Side-effects of Champix

• Nausea is the most familiar side-effect, more often than not in the first few weeks of treatment. It should look up as you go on with to take the tablets.
• Other general side-effects include headache, difficulty in sleeping, abnormal dreams, amplified appetite, taste changes, dry mouth, drowsiness, tiredness, dizziness, and gut disturbances such as constipation, diarrhea or indigestion.

What is nicotine replacement therapy?

Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is the name given to stop-smoking medicines that discharge nicotine into the bloodstream to assist counter cravings and decrease other bodily withdrawal symptoms when you give up (nausea, headaches, irritability, and dizziness).

These products don’t offer you the same kind of buzz as you get from cigarettes, but they do decrease cravings. NRT isn’t destined to put back smoking, but to slowly wean you off nicotine.

NRT products still contain nicotine, which is destructive and addictive, but they carry smaller amounts than cigarettes and with no many of the other harmful substances in tobacco, such as tar and carbon monoxide.

The idea is to aid you through the untimely phase when you require the most help and slowly lessen your addiction on nicotine.

Most forms of NRT can be paying for over-the-counter from any pharmacy, but it is also obtainable on prescription. This means if you meet the criteria for free prescriptions, you can get NRT without charge on the NHS.

What is Zyban?

Buproprion is a prescription-only medicine that was at first planned as an antidepressant.

Its capability to aid people stop smoking came about by chance when participants in the untimely clinical trials lost their wish to smoke.

Launched in the UK in 2000, it’s sold under the brand name Zyban, and helps just about one in five people who take it to stop smoking.

It’s not known precisely how Zyban works, but it’s thought to break off the areas of the brain that are linked with addiction and the enjoyable effects of nicotine.

This reduces the aspiration to smoke and dampens the bodily symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.