[Tobacco smoking by alcohol addicted patients--preliminary report]

The problem of alcohol and nicotine addiction is both social and medical. The substances are often used together and give complex addiction. The knowledge about mechanisms of complex addiction would be useful for creating effective ways of treatment the abused patients. The aim of the paper was to describe the complex ethanol and nicotine addiction phenomenon. The research was made using data from 30 ethanol and nicotine addicted patients treated in Clinic of Toxicology Jagiellonian University Collegium Medicum in Krakow. 90% of them were nicotine addicted. Tobacco was the first abused substance in the group of patients. The mean period of addiction was 29.0 years for tobacco and 22.2 years for alcohol. The majority of the patients (51.9%) smoked more than 20 cigarettes per day; 29.6% smoked 11-20 cigarettes per day. Single patients were narcotics and drugs addicted. Continuation of the research and toxicological determination of the substances and their metabolites concentrations would be useful for the complex addiction problem explanation and description.