Effects of Cigarette Smoking and 3‐Day Smoking Abstinence on Translocator Protein 18 kDa Availability: A [<sup>18</sup>F]FEPPA Positron Emission Tomography Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT With the many negative health consequences of cigarette smoking, quitting is known to improve health in multiple domains. Using positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) scanning, our group previously demonstrated that smokers have lower levels than nonsmokers of translocator protein binding both acutely and following overnight abstinence. Here, we sought to determine the effects of longer smoking abstinence on this marker of gliosis for microglia and astroglia, as well as explore associations between the marker and smoking‐related symptoms. This observational study was performed in an academic VA medical centre. Fifty‐nine generally healthy Veterans who were either nonsmokers ( n = 15) or smokers ( n = 44) participated in the study. Participants completed an intake visit to evaluate for inclusion/exclusion criteria, [ 18 F]FEPPA PET/CT scanning and a structural magnetic resonance imaging scan. Smokers were alternately assigned either to smoke to satiety ( n = 24) before scanning or undergo three nights of continuous abstinence prior to scanning using contingency management ( n = 20 completed this protocol and scanning). The smoker satiety group had a significantly lower mean whole brain (WB) standardized uptake value (SUV) for [ 18 F]FEPPA binding than both the nonsmoking (−15.3%) and abstinent smoker (−12.3%) groups. The nonsmoking control and abstinent smoker groups had mean WB SUVs that were not significantly different from one another (3.0% group difference). In an exploratory analysis, a significant inverse relationship was found between WB SUVs and mood ratings for smokers, indicating that higher levels of TSPO binding were associated with worse mood. The central findings here support previous studies demonstrating lower levels of the marker for gliosis in satiated smokers and imply normalization with elimination of cigarette smoke constituents from the body, although other explanations for study results (e.g., alterations in radioligand delivery or clearance of radioligand by cigarette smoke constituents) are possible. These findings may represent a previously unknown health benefit of quitting smoking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".