Nicotine and pain?

[Wolfgang]

Wow Thanks,

that was what i was looking for. For anyone else here is part of the article.

"Nicotine's salutary effects in patients with neurodegenerative and mental disorders have been studied a lot and are fairly well known. Two much newer topics of academic research are nicotine's potential for pain relief and for treating obesity.Nicotine itself has provided modest pain relief in animal studies. Although the analgesic effect of drugs that mimic acetylcholine were originally attributed to a different class of receptors, it is now clear that nAChRs play an important role in the control of pain. For instance, epibatidine, a drug that is extracted from the skin of an Ecuadorian frog and that acts at nAChRs, has been shown to be 200 times more potent than morphine at blocking pain in animals. Current animal research is aimed at discovering just where, how, and which classes of nAChRs work against pain, with the aim of developing more selective drugs.
Meanwhile, nicotine is also being investigated as an analgesic in humans. For example, Pamela Flood, an anesthesiologist at Columbia, is investigating nicotine's future as a postoperative analgesic. She recently completed a pilot study of 20 women undergoing gynecological surgery. All the women had access to unlimited morphine and also got either a single 3-mg dose of nicotine nasal spray or a placebo. The placebo group had peak pain scores of eight out of a possible ten in the first hour after surgery. Women who got nicotine averaged a pain score of five. Despite the small sample size, Flood says, the results were highly significant. “As far as I know this is the first clinical study to use nicotine for analgesia, and it was much more successful than I ever would have imagined.”
“The nice thing about nicotine and drugs like nicotine is that they have opposite side effects to anesthetics. Instead of being respiratory depressants, they are respiratory stimulants. Instead of being sedating, they increase alertness. So theoretically this class of drugs is actually the perfect thing to add to an opioid regimen. The fact that they're synergistic was a fortuitous thing that we had never looked at, and neither had anybody else.”