Abstract

Smoking cessation usually results in weight gain. Nicotine gum therapy has been found to reduce weight gain in the first months after cessation, but its long-term effects are not fully known. The present study randomly assigned 608 smokers to receive placebo, 2 or 4 mg nicotine gum. In a follow-up analysis to the short-term weight change results reported in a previous paper [Doherty, Militello, Kinnunen, & Garvey (1996), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 64:799-807], we examined the effects of the nicotine gum on weight change for 1 year after cessation among the 92 1-year abstainers. We found that weight change showed some variation with gum dose (active vs. placebo), but that weight change appeared to depend more strongly on the percentage of pre-cessation cotinine levels replaced by the nicotine gum. Participants who replaced higher proportions of their pre-cessation cotinine during the gum therapy period gained less weight during the first year post-cessation than those who replaced less cotinine, with those who replaced greater than 90% of their cotinine gaining only 1.7 kg by 1 year post-cessation. These findings suggest that future research is warranted to determine whether sufficiently high levels of nicotine replacement can help to permanently reduce cessation-related weight gain.