New year, new you, right? Right. Let’s face it: the time is high to quit everything (though, statistically speaking, only 46% of us will see our resolutions past the six month mark). Well, here’s news for those of you struggling with quitting the old cancer sticks: a new report released for the Journal of Translational Psychiatry proposes that the ability to successfully quit might lie within your genes.
The Will (And The DNA) To Succeed
For a while scientists have suspected the existence of a genetic marker dubbed the “stop smoking gene.” After going through data from 22 studies that totaled over 9,000 patients, Professor Ming Li from University of Virginia’s Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, alongside Dr. Yulong Ma of Zhejiang University in China and their research teams, zeroed in on this DNA sequence, the aforementioned “stop smoking gene,” which is called ANKK1.
The element of it that’s important in this context is called Taq1A. According to The Roanoke Times, “Li’s team examined studies dating back to the mid-1990s and found that when they controlled for ethnicity and excluded subjects with cancer, there was a significant relationship between smoking cessation and different variations of Taq1A.” The variation of Taq1A that people in the studies who successfully quit smoking have is called A2/A2 and the ethnicity with the most consistent display of it was Caucasian: the LA Times report about the findings specified that 62.5% of white people in the study had it while only 39.1% of Asians studied did. (There weren’t enough research subjects of other ethnic backgrounds to determine how they factor in.)
Dr. Ma and Professor Li both concluded that knowing a person’s genetic disposition as it relates to addictive tendencies (or quitting addictive substances) will help doctors develop better, more personalized strategies for addiction treatment (though they haven’t yet delved into the how and why of those strategies).
Genes Aren’t Magic
Of course, as the study’s authors’ point out, there are a lot of other factors that play into a person’s success rate when it comes to quitting smoking, including stress, age, environment, whether their favorite football team loses the Super Bowl, if they vow to quit then decide they’re only a “social smoker” who has one when they drink…you get it. So specially tailored treatment and genetically blessed will power be damned, sometimes people are still gonna smoke. Or drink. Or shoot heroin. Nothing is ever black and white when it comes to addiction (and a lot of other issues). So good on science for trying to make this all very, well, scientific, but once substance abuse is in full force, a genetic marker is just a small, small piece of the puzzle.
I think knowing you’re genetically predisposed to something can go one of two ways: either you’re going to say, “Fuck it. What’s the point in trying? I was born this way” or “Fuck it. I don’t care what my genetic doomsday disposition is. I’m licking this habit for good!” For me, knowing there was alcoholism in my extended family and not so great luck with lungs in my immediate family helped motivate me to try to skirt whatever unpleasant fate was already set in stone at birth. I quit drinking when I realized I could never successfully moderate and felt like my attempts at trying were getting more and more feeble.
In other words, genes aren’t always on our side but luckily, an array of self-help books, hypnotists, exercises classes, 12-step support groups and straight up determination can be.
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