Nicotine dependence has reached a 15-year high, with nearly 75 percent of people currently seeking tobacco-dependence treatment categorized as highly nicotine dependent.

For decades now, cigarette makers have marketed so-called light cigarettes — which contain less nicotine than regular smokes — with the implication that they are less harmful to smokers' health. A new UCLA study shows, however, that they deliver nearly as much nicotine to the brain.

New research from The University of Western Ontario reveals how the brain processes the 'rewarding' and addictive properties of nicotine, providing a better understanding of why some people seemingly become hooked with their first smoke.

Common genetic variations affecting nicotine receptors in the nervous system can significantly increase the chance that European Americans who begin smoking by age 17 will struggle with lifelong nicotine addiction, according to researchers at the University of Utah and their colleagues at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This is what the brain says when people use tobacco, as well as ‘hard drugs’ such as heroin. New research published in the February 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience indicates that the effects of nicotine and opiates on the brain's reward system are equally strong in a key pleasure-sensing areas of the brain – the nucleus accumbens.

It is not a slumber party getting a good night’s sleep if you are a smoker.

Scientists are reporting the first successful strategy to reduce smokers’ nicotine dependence while allowing them to continue smoking. The study provides strong support for proposals now being considered in Congress to authorize FDA regulation of cigarette smoking, according to the research team.

Following up on studies that have indicated the speed with which adolescents can get hooked on cigarettes, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have conducted the first study to determine why some adolescents who try smoking get addicted while others do not.

Whether a smoking-cessation drug will enable you to quit smoking may depend on your genes, according to new genotyping research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The study, published in the September issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that the enzyme known to metabolize both the smoking cessation drug bupropion and nicotine is highly genetically variable in all ethnicities and influences smoking cessation.

The stranglehold of nicotine addiction leads to more than four million smoking-related deaths each year. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have now explained two roots of that addiction. The discoveries may offer new hope not just for smokers, but eventually also for sufferers of Parkinson's disease, a debilitating movement disorder that affects some 40 million people worldwide.

Ever wonder why smoking and depression seem to go together" A Saint Louis University School of Public Health researcher finds the connection is genetic.

A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine shows that 10 percent of youth who become hooked on cigarettes are addicted within two days of first inhaling from a cigarette, and 25 percent are addicted within a month.