Early adult smoking protects from schizophrenia

Main Category: Schizophrenia
Article Date: 31 Dec 2003 - 0:00 PDT

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If you smoke early in your adult life you could be protecting yourself from developing schizophrenia in later life.

Research published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry studied 50,000 Swedish conscripts from 1970 to 1996 to determine hospital admission for schizophrenia with 362 (0.70%) subjects diagnosed with the disease by the end of the study period.

The authors found an association between smoking cigarettes at age 18 and a lower rate of developing schizophrenia with a linear relationship between the number of cigarettes smoked and a lower risk of schizophrenia.

'Cigarette smoking may be an independent protective factor for developing schizophrenia. These results are consistent with animal models showing both neuroprotective effects of nicotine and differential release of prefrontal dopamine in response to nicotine. The harmful effects of cigarette smoking vastly outweigh any possible benefits, but nevertheless, further investigation may lead to important insights regarding the etiology of schizophrenia at a molecular level,' they concude.

Reference: Zammit S et al (2003) Investigating the Association Between Cigarette Smoking and Schizophrenia in a Cohort Study Am J Psychiatry 160 (12) 2216-2221