Study: Smokers can learn to dislike cigarettes while sleeping

A study claims that smokers can be taught to dislike cigarettes while they are sleeping.

Bad smells during sleep may teach smokers to dislike cigarettes and help them cut back, a new study hints.

Smokers who were exposed to the smell of cigarettes along with an unpleasant odor during a single night of sleep smoked less for days afterward, the researchers found.

This study shows that "sleep learning can influence later wake behavior," says Anat Arzi. She's a PhD student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

She presented the study at the Society for Neuroscience 2014 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Subliminal Messages

"This research stems from recent findings suggesting that novel associations can be learned during human sleep and retrieved upon awakening," Arzi said during a media briefing.

The researchers chose this method because the brain’s reward system, which is activated during addictive behavior, shares traits with the olfactory system, or sense of smell.

The study involved 76 adult smokers who wanted to quit. During 1 night in the sleep lab, they were exposed to cigarette smells and the smell of rotten fish or rotten eggs during light sleep (known as stage 2 sleep) or during "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep, when people tend to dream. The odors didn't wake up the participants, Arzi said.

The experiment was also done while the smokers were awake. 

They kept a diary of how many cigarettes they smoked for 7 days before and 7 days after the experiment.

The linking of the cigarette smell to the rotten food smell is called aversive conditioning. The smokers who had aversive conditioning during stage 2 sleep reduced smoking by 34% in the following week. When conditioning was done during REM sleep, they cut back on smoking by 12%.

"The reduction in smoking was significantly larger and longer-lasting following conditioning during stage 2 sleep in comparison to REM sleep," Arzi said.

Aversive conditioning while smokers were awake did not lessensmoking.

"We know that behavioral approaches can help treat nicotine addiction, but none have been remarkably successful," Arzi said in a conference statement.

More study is needed to figure out whether the tactic could work as a quit-smoking aid and a potential treatment for addiction in general, she said during the briefing.

Useful Tool

Marina Picciotto, PhD, from Yale University, said the findings "could be a very useful tool to both motivate and assist people in quitting who might not otherwise have even thought about quitting. This study used smokers, but you could imagine that this could be applied to any addiction."

"We don't know yet from this early study how long the effect lasts and how useful it will be to actually induce quitting, but … the potential as a treatment is there," Picciotto said.

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Quitting smoking can help you with a good night's sleep

A recent study shows that quitting smoking has many health benefits, such as increasing her sleep quality.

As if cancer, heart disease and other diseases were not enough motivation to make quitting smoking your New Year's resolution, here's another wake-up call: New research published in the January 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal suggests that smoking disrupts the circadian clock function in both the lungs and the brain. Translation: Smoking ruins productive sleep, leading to cognitive dysfunction, mood disorders, depression and anxiety.

"This study has found a common pathway whereby cigarette smoke impacts both pulmonary and neurophysiological function. Further, the results suggest the possible therapeutic value of targeting this pathway with compounds that could improve both lung and brain functions in smokers," said Irfan Rahman, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y. "We envisage that our findings will be the basis for future developments in the treatment of those patients who are suffering with tobacco smoke-mediated injuries and diseases.

Rahman and colleagues found that tobacco smoke affects clock gene expression rhythms in the lung by producing parallel inflammation and depressed levels of brain locomotor activity. Short- and long- term smoking decreased a molecule known as SIRTUIN1 (SIRT1, an anti-aging molecule) and this reduction altered the level of the clock protein (BMAL1) in both lung and brain tissues in mice. A similar reduction was seen in lung tissue from human smokers and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). They made this discovery using two groups of mice which were placed in smoking chambers for short-term and long-term tobacco inhalation. One of the groups was exposed to clean air only and the other was exposed to different numbers of cigarettes during the day. Researchers monitored their daily activity patterns and found that these mice were considerably less active following smoke exposure.

Scientists then used mice deficient in SIRT1 and found that tobacco smoke caused a dramatic decline in activity but this effect was attenuated in mice that over expressed this protein or were treated with a small pharmacological activator of the anti-aging protein. Further results suggest that the clock protein, BMAL1, was regulated by SIRT1, and the decrease in SIRT1 damaged BMAL1, resulting in a disturbance in the sleep cycle/molecular clock in mice and human smokers. However, this defect was restored by a small molecule activator of SIRT1.

"If you only stick to one New Year's resolution this year, make it quitting smoking," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "Only Santa Claus has a list longer than that of the ailments caused or worsened by smoking. If you like having a good night's sleep, then that's just another reason to never smoke."

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