Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'll simply start telling folks I'm a schizophrenic to justify my pack a day habit.
Would you want to see what happens when I try to quit?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
And all this time I thought that the voice in my head telling me not to smoke was common sense.
As I suffer from schizophrenia myself I know how bad your memory can get because of it. Maybe there is a connection between I stopped smoking and I (finally) got a diagnose on what was wrong with me. Perhaps it made the symptoms clearer?
I sure hope it is correct and doesn't get debunked.
Nicotine can also be a potent self-medication for other mental health issues. For example, nicotine (as a stimulant) is often used by those with ADHD to self-medicate.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Schizophrenics have been said to "self medicate" with nicotine for YEARS. When I started in the field in 1998 it was already a conclusion everyone was working under.
Schizophrenia Bulletin 1998 24(2):189-202;
A series of human and animal investigations has suggested that altered expression and function of the {alpha}7-nicotinic cholinergic receptor may be responsible for the auditory sensory gating deficit characterized in schizophrenia patients and their relatives as diminished suppression of an auditory-evoked response (P50) to repeated stimuli. This finding, in conjunction with evidence for familial transmission of this sensory gating deficit, suggests a pathogenic role of the gene for the {alpha}7-nicotinic receptor in schizophrenia. This article considers the possible effects of this dysfunction in a broader context. Not only is this dysfunction consistent with difficulties in sensory gating, but it might also pre dispose patients to problems with learning efficiency and accuracy. Such learning problems could underlie schizophrenia patients' delusional thinking, hallucinations, and social dysfunction. In addition, heavy smoking in many schizophrenia patients is consistent with the high concentration of nicotine necessary to activate the receptor and with the receptor's extremely rapid desensitization. Finally, the receptor's possible role in cell growth and differentiation should be considered in connection with developmental deficits and other cellular abnormalities in schizophrenia.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
I would have thought smoking would bring on mental problems in the first place rather than be a palliative.
Nicotine improves brain function even in non-schizophrenics, because it binds to acetylcholine receptors. Of course, the most common delivery methods have one or two negative side effects.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Smoking Away Schizophrenia? Scientific American Mind, 2007-11-27.
Scientific American also published an article in 2003 suggesting that a by-product of nicotine can slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease. It does not take a nicotine-addict to see that CNS stimulants can have beneficial effects on brain function.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Ulcerative colitis (warning, gross picture of internals). I've been a sufferer since I was in my early teens, and was in a state of active flare ups for nearly five years, even going to the hospital now and then. I've been on dozens of medications for it, from immunosuppressants to steroids to everything doctors could come up with.
When I was 19, a doctor mentioned smoking, off the record. He didn't want to actively advise me to smoke, but I was 19 and in danger of needing my colon surgically removed already. I, like a good geek, read everything about it I could find. I hated my first pack of cigs, but by the time I was through it--nearly a week--my symptoms were subsiding. Since then, one flare up in six years that lasted for two weeks. Trade-offs, eh?
Nicotine sharpens the mind while simultaneously relaxing the muscles. That's why it's so addictive. Duh.
In fact, personally, I blame the lack of smoking by people for the general dumbing-down of everyone and everything including Slashdot. Oh? You doubt me? Ha! Just go read some of the threads on Slashdot from back in the 40s and 50s and compare it to the drivel of today. Notice, in particular, the civility of discourse and the lack of Linux/Apple/Microsoft fanbois. You'll see.
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.
The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are those the public is most likely to bring to mind when envisioning schizophrenics, these include auditory hallucinations and paranoid behaviour. It's these symptoms that seem to be most amenable to treatment with drugs that act on the dopamine system. The second set of the disease's symptoms are termed negative symptoms and include social isolation and degrees of depression. These secondary symptoms currently have few effective treatments. My best guess would be that nicotine and smoking, (the ritual and anachronistic, Freudian, oral pleasure) treat the secondary symptoms.
FWIW I'm a diagnosed schizophrenic with a uni education and a plus 160 IQ. I've been diagnosed as schizophrenic, schizo-affective, and, possibly not schizophrenic at all; but my favourite diagnosis came from a neuropsychiatrist, who, upon learning that I had begun studies of epistemology at age 17, said: "People who study epistemology... (long pause)... I don't know... (head shaking)... I just don't know." My case seems to be the more interesting because I recognized my symptoms and sought medical attention, and, while suffering the full range of symptoms, was able to deal with them as symptoms of a disease and not as in any way defining who I am or considering them as causes of action. John Nash, he of "A Beautiful Mind" escaped the symptoms of his schizophrenia when he learned not to argue with his voices. The most debilitating aspect of schizophrenia is that people seem not to understand that it's a brain based disease and that the mind, as put by a neuroscientist, is just the brain doing it's job. More high functioning schizophrenics are able to get on with their lives because schizophrenia is now known to be a a disease no different than any other and the symptoms can be detected, marked, treated, minimized, and, over time, all but disregarded in day to day life.
ideopath @ play
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.
Electronic Cigarettes (more accurately -Personal Vaporizer or PV) simply vaporize a nicotine solution to avoid the harmful effects of smoke and its 8000 chemicals.
I was on a pack a day for 15 years and in a month of starting 'vaping' i have gone to zero analog cigarettes without missing my nic kick.
Checkout Wikipedia for basic info or ecig-forum for detailed info.
These look like normal cigarettes, have rechargeable batteries with convenient cartridges or refilling BUT it does takes a week or two to get everything right,so be careful of which model etc you choose. Ask me for advise if in doubt.
Incidentally, FDA is trying to ban them for some of the most stupid reasons
AND - I am not associated with any seller etc. so its not a plug. Just trying to help !