Health - is nicorette harmful?

[seeingred]

SWIM chews the gum sometimes because it seems to alleviate anxiety as well as help focus...

[dr ACE]

not in small ammounts. the most dangerous thing about commercial tobbacco is all the added nasty carcinogenic chemicals

[Dvgrn]

Not nearly as harmful as smoking cigarettes, or chewing tobacco, but i believe i read that long term use can still lead to mouth, and bladder cancers.

[seeingred]

Originally Posted by Dvgrn

Not nearly as harmful as smoking cigarettes, or chewing tobacco, but i believe i read that long term use can still lead to mouth, and bladder cancers.

That's probably the nicotine then. I didn't know that nicotine causes cancer and always thought it was just the carcinogens and smoke. Have they found proof that nicotine indeed does lead to cancer or that its the tar and additives?

[Lunar Loops]

Well there is no real evidence to suggest that nicotine itself causes cancer (that SWIS is aware of), but there have been studies that suggest that it promotes cancer growth (makes cancer more aggressive). See the following taken from New Scientits in July last year:

How nicotine helps cancer grow

• 13:26 21 July 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Roxanne Khamsi

Nicotine influences a key cancer pathway in cells, which may explain how it speeds up cancer growth, says a new study. The researchers believe their results may help in the design of better anti-cancer drugs.
"We believe that these components can be targeted for cancer therapy," says Srikumar Chellappan of the University of South Florida, in Tampa, US, who led the study. "So we are quite excited about the new therapeutic avenues this study has revealed."
Rather than initiate cancer, nicotine seems to make existing cancers more aggressive, he says. Previous studies have found, for example, that breast cancer is more likely to spread to the lungs of patients who smoke than those who do not. And blocking the receptors for nicotine on the surface of aggressive cancer cells in a laboratory dish halts their growth (see Nicotine speeds the growth of lung cancers).
Cigarette smoking can nevertheless trigger the development of cancer, stresses Chellappan. By-products of nicotine and other compounds are to blame, though, rather than nicotine itself.

[top]One pack a day

Although it was known that nicotine makes cancers more aggressive, relatively little is known about how it has this effect. To explore this question Chellappan and his colleagues looked at the specific molecules in cancer cells that interact with nicotine.
They exposed human lung cancer cells to an amount of nicotine equivalent to that present in the bloodstream of a person who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day. This stimulated the cells to replicate. A closer look revealed that nicotine caused a molecule called Raf-1 to bind to a key protein called Rb, which normally suppresses tumours.
This interference with the Rb protein's function could make the cancer spread faster, says Chellappan. Eight out of ten tumours examined by his group had abnormally high Raf-1 and Rb interactions, a finding that lends further support to this idea.
"One area of active research in our laboratory is to identify agents that can prevent the binding of Raf-1 and Rb," says Chellappan, adding that such drugs "could have potent anti-cancer activities".
Journal reference: Journal of Clinical Investigation (DOI: 10.1172/JCI28164)

[eltimmy]

There is evidence that nicotine alone protects against the development of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. It is robustly neuroprotective alone -- not in cigarettes, which are conclusively toxic.