Doctors Say You Can Go Ahead and Slap a Nicotine Patch on for Some Extra Focus

People who struggle with concentration can, according to some doctors, have a nicotine patch as a treat.

As Slate reports, there's a small but growing body of evidence suggesting that products used to help people quit smoking are safe and effective off-label treatments for all manner of disorders, including cognitive issues.

"We have found that nicotine patches are useful along a whole spectrum of impairments, like people with ADHD, Alzheimer’s, and people with age-related memory and cognitive impairment," Duke University psychiatry and nicotine researcher Edward Levin told the online magazine.

Schizophrenia, depression, and even Parkinson's disease are on that list as well — as well as brain fog, a nebulous condition in which one is fatigued and unable to focus, per a small study published in 2023 in the journal Bioelectronic Medicine.

Like many brain fog sufferers, Slate writer Hannah Singleton was perturbed by her condition because neither doctors nor alternative health practices seemed to help. When she ran across the Bioelectronic Medicine study, which found that four people with long COVID brain fog who used nicotine patches for a week had seen a marked improvement in concentration, she was intrigued.

Because patches seemed like too much nicotine for her to handle at seven milligrams, Singleton opted to use the lowest-dose nicotine gum she could find, which contained only two. Within an hour, her "brain felt like it had come back online in a way it hadn’t in months," and she became a convert then and there.

While tobacco products like cigarettes, vapes, and snuff are known for their many terrible side effects, the patches are safer because they deliver nicotine, which stimulates brain receptors, in slow, controlled doses.

"We know that nicotine receptors are involved particularly in attention — so the ability to focus and maintain attention, all of that seems to have an important role for nicotinic signaling," Paul Newhouse, a Vanderbilt cognitive medicine specialist, told Slate. "And attention is the front end of memory, right? So without attention, you can’t encode or remember anything."

Along with Levin, the Duke researcher, Newhouse published a pioneering study in 2012 that found that short-term nicotine use can help improve cognitive functioning for people with cognitive impairments — and the pair is now finishing a larger, multi-year follow-up to see how that same initial cohort fared years later.

As fascinating as those studies are, people who use nicotine therapeutically are still, Singleton notes, "very much experimenting."

"There are no protocols or prescribed doses approved by the Food and Drug Administration," she continued. "Overall, it might be accurate to say that nicotine 'holds promise' as a potential tool for brain functioning."

Still, using nicotine patches to help with concentration is a compelling, if not surprising, off-label use — and with stimulant medications backlogged in a years-long manufactured shortage, a safe over-the-counter alternative is good to keep in one's back pocket.

More on cognitive function: Man Alarmed as His Cognitive Skills Decay After Outsourcing Them to AI

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