While recent reviews confirm the validity of particular symptoms associated with nicotine abstinence, particularly DSM-IV nicotine withdrawal symptoms (Hughes, 2007a; Hughes, 2007b; Hughes, 2007c; Shiffman et al., 2004) the predominate method of examining the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal symptoms has been to explore the factor structure or mean change in symptoms across time. While these main effects provide important information for construct validation of nicotine withdrawal symptoms, this standard approach is “variable-centric” rather than “individual-centric”; the latter approach aims to identify subgroups of smokers that are more likely to experience particular symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. In addition, many studies to date have relied heavily on volunteer and clinical samples with few (like Breslau et al., 1992) estimates of nicotine withdrawal based on large general population samples, which can provide additional power to examine subgroups of individuals for whom particular symptoms of nicotine withdrawal co-occur.
