Quitting smoking without a psychotic break: the potential link between nicotinic acetylcholine receptor partial agonists and neuropsychiatric adverse events.

Tobacco use claims more than 440,000 lives a year, with nearly half dying premature death from tobaccorelated illnesses. Approximately 47.5 million adults smoke. Seventy percent want to quit, and 42.5% attempt to quit each year. Smoking cessation is correlated with reduced mortality and morbidity. Benefits include reduced risk for lung cancer, chronic lung disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, and lowYbirth-weight infants. Many of the effects of nicotine are reversible, and after 10 years, life expectancy of a smoker approaches that of a nonsmoker. However, tobacco dependence is a chronic and difficult condition to treat, and smoking cessation usually requires many attempts to quit. Despite the availability of nicotine replacement therapy and bupropion, abstinence rates remain low.