African Americans may be at greater risk for cigarette addiction and smoking-related disease than whites, and darker-skinned African Americans may be at higher risk than those who are lighter-skinned, because the pigment responsible for dark skin color appears to play a role in nicotine addiction and disease, researchers said last week.
Melanin, the coloring pigment in skin and hair, has a biochemical affinity for nicotine, the drug that smokers crave. The greater the amount of melanin people have, the harder it could be for them to quit smoking, according to a report in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.
The researchers found an increased risk of addiction not only among people who had darker skin as a result of their genes but also among people whose skin had been darkened as a result of exposure to sunlight. In both cases, those with the darkest skin tended to smoke the most number of cigarettes.
One implication of the research is that studying smokers at different times of the year could produce different results, because of varying amounts of sunlight.
“One of the questions we want to address is why African Americans have lower quit rates than whites,” one of the authors, Gary King, a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a statement.
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