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Nicotine Improves Brain Function In Schizophrenics
An anonymous reader suggests a Cosmos Magazine note that nicotine has been shown to enhance attention and memory in schizophrenics. Research is now aimed at developing new treatments that could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths. "A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link. Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings."
Nicotine itself is unlikely to make an effective treatment, because of its side effects and addictive potential, but drugs known as nicotinic agonists, which target nicotine receptors in the brain, are front runners in the challenge to find an effective replacement.
Haha. So rather than use a cheap natural solution it's better to get the expensive patented synthetic stuff. Riiiiiight... Now I see.
Would you want to see what happens when I try to quit?
You'd live longer?
1. I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
If you're smoking R1, as an extreme example, you're paying 4.4 euro for 1.7mg nicotine total. Or about 2.6 euro per milligram. For other brands of cigarettes, ok, you can get up to 10 times cheaper per mg, but it's still bloody expensive.
I'd think that the expensive patented stuff could gouge you like the medieval tax collectors -- or like HP for ink as a modern day equivalent -- and still be a lot cheaper.
2. You obviously skipped past half the sentence you answer to. The problem with just using the (not so) cheap natural stuff is:
A) it's extremely addictive stuff. And actually the real problem with that isn't the obvious "OMG, it's getting people addicted." It's that, like all physiological addictions:
- you're building resistance to it
- it's moving the baseline state to worse
So soon you'll either need more and more nicotine to actually fix that schizophrenia, or you'll need your regular fixes just to keep yourself at the point where you'd be if you never started with it in the first place. And you'll actually be worse off when you can't get your fix.
B) it creates a bunch of other problems. E.g., that it's a vasoconstrictor (which is actually the root of more smoking-related health problems than the smoke in the lungs), or that it inhibits osteoblasts (so if you treat someone post-menopause generously enough with it, they'll get fractures), etc.
C) nicotine is a poison. It's only safe to use because there's very little in a cigarette, and most of it burns. You're actually getting very little of it in your system. But there just isn't that much margin between that and when things start to get uglier. So especially in view of problem A, you don't want a treatment which will over time escalate dangerously close to the toxic dosage to do anything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Meanwhile, prescriptions for anti-depressants have skyrocketed....
It's too bad that those safer methods all end up more expensive, banned, or prescription only (and so MUCH more expensive).
If politicians ACTUALLY wanted people to quit smoking then nicotine gum and patches would be cheaper and easier to get than cigarettes.
It is amusing when the boogyman turns out to have an upside, isn't it?
While I'm sure that in a clinical setting, the route of administration would be pills, patch, gum, or nasal spray the anti-smoking crowd STILL can't stand the thought that nicotine might enhance cognition and memory or have fewer and milder side-effects than the drugs already being used.
The pharmaceutical companies are fully on the bandwagon with them, m,ostly because they can't patent nicotine.
Together they cry out that surely it will turn out that only some patented expensive drug that works just like nicotine (except it doesn't strangle puppies) will be the answer. It can't possibly be Nicorette or the patch.
The same strange doublethink happens with opoid painkillers for people in chronic pain. They pop liver damaging analgesics like dope fiends because they experience unbearable pain if they stop, but they can't have cheap opiates in appropriate doses because they might pop them like a dope fiend and be unable to stop.
Bill Hicks is rolling in his fucking grave.