Skin Tone May Impact the Effectiveness of Nicotine Patches

Hi, it’s Anna in Virginia. I’m going to tell you about an unexpected way our bodies can influence a drug’s effectiveness, but first...

Many factors can affect how well a drug works: age, whether you’ve eaten, your weight and even drinking grapefruit juice. Recently, I learned skin color can also play a role.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, highlighted this last week in the journal Human Genomics and called for drugmakers to take steps to better understand the reaction between melanin, the substance that determines skin tone, and medications.

There are two main types of melanin, they say. Studies have indicated that the one associated with darker skin tones, eumelanin, naturally binds to certain compounds. The scientists list several such compounds, including nicotine. What this means, they write, is that nicotine could accumulate at much higher levels in Black people’s skin.

This has implications for understanding nicotine addiction as well as smoking cessation, particularly when it comes to nicotine replacement therapies like patches, the researchers say. The patches, which people typically stick to their arms or chest, are supposed to supply a steady flow of nicotine throughout the day to to help reduce cravings.

But if eumelanin’s affinity for nicotine impacts that flow, it could mean people with darker skin will have a harder time quitting. This is an especially important issue for smokers who want to quit and plan to use a cessation method to help. In 2022, about 30% of those people used patches, according to the National Institutes of Health.