Millions of people struggle with concentration in one form or another. It could be anything from just having difficulty focusing on studying for a test in college to dealing with a devastating disease like Alzheimer’s, or anything in between. The ability to concentrate on something and retain information is essential in everyday life, but it isn’t always as easy as one would hope.

For some people, using medications like Adderall or other ADHD treatments can help, but those come with some serious side effects. Plus, there has been a shortage of those drugs for years now due to manufacturing issues.

So, what can people do to try to improve their concentration? Well, according to some research and a growing number of doctors, using a nicotine patch or gum might be a good solution. Slate recently reported on the growing popularity of these products, which are designed to help people quit smoking, and are being used to help with concentration, and it is surprising how well they seem to work. In the report, Edward Levin, a Duke University psychiatrist and nicotine researcher, said:

“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.”

There was also a study in 2023 that said that these patches can be helpful in dealing with a variety of mental issues, including brain fog, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia.

Many people are hesitant to try something like this because of the well-known negative side effects of things like smoking and vaping, which are the most popular methods of getting nicotine. Using it as a patch or a gum, however, may be seen as healthier because it doesn’t come with a variety of other chemicals. Also, with the patch or gum, it is possible to very precisely control how much nicotine the person is getting. Of course, the risk of addiction would still be present.

While the overall health impact of regular use of these products needs to be studied further, it does seem pretty clear that they can be effective at helping people to concentrate. Paul Newhouse is a Vanderbilt cognitive medicine specialist. In the Slate report, he said:

“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. And attention is the front end of memory, right? So without attention, you can’t encode or remember anything.”

Newhouse and Levin published a study in 2012 that looked at how short-term nicotine use is able to provide benefits to cognitive functioning for people with different types of cognitive impairments. They are now working on a follow-up to that study, but it has not yet been published.

It is important to be clear that using nicotine patches or gums in this way is still very much understudied, and the full impact on overall health is unknown. For those who struggle with brain fog or concentration, however, it may be worth talking to a medical professional to see if it is worth a try.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.