INSTRUCTION: Read the following text to answer the question.
How can neuroscience lead to
treatments for nicotine addiction?
Around a billion people still smoke, so we clearly have more
to learn about effective treatments for nicotine addiction.
Medications that can help include bupropion, a classical
antidepressant, which mostly helps people who are
depressed to stop smoking; and varenicline, which imitates
nicotine in some ways but prevents nicotinic receptors from
being fully activated.
Some nicotine cessation products, such as gums and
patches and inhalers, use nicotine itself in the hope that
it can be delivered in small enough quantities and over a
long enough period of time that nicotine receptors will only
be partially chaperoned, helping to reduce upregulation
while the individual works on quitting smoking.
We still need more and better science to figure out the
pharmacokinetics of nicotine: How fast does it enter the
body? How long does it stay in the body? To that end,
along with a team of collaborators — including Caltech
professors Wei Gao (professor of medical engineering),
Dennis Dougherty (George Grant Hoag Professor of
Chemistry), and Stephen Mayo (Bren Professor of Biology
and Chemistry), and Professor Neal Benowitz of UC San
Francisco — we have been working to develop a wearable
device that resembles the continuous glucose monitor used
by Type 1 diabetes patients.
We will use this monitor to measure nicotine while a person
smokes or vapes or uses a nicotine pouch so that we can
fully understand how an individual metabolizes nicotine
and relate this knowledge to a century’s worth of work on
nicotinic receptors and nicotine addiction.
Available at: https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/neuroscience/neuroscience-experts/nicotine-addictionneuroscience-henry-lester#what-happens-in-the-brainwhen-people-smoke. Accessed on: Aug 1st, 2025
The text suggests that products designed to help people
quit nicotine, such as gums and patches, are effective by
