Schizophrenia Patients Show Cognitive Improvements After Smoking Cessation

Quoting from article:

At baseline, 66.6% of the psychosis patients smoked, compared with 38.3% of the siblings and 25.2% of the control subjects. The authors identified a significant association between smoking and lower performance in tasks related to processing speed, working memory, and/or problem solving in all three groups. For processing speed and problem solving, the deficits were dose-dependent; that is, the more cigarettes smoked per day, the lower the average performance.

Assessments at follow-up visits showed that patients who quit smoking had significant improvements in processing speed compared with those who did not quit smoking; patients who quit gained almost five points on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale digit-symbol coding task. This association was not found in siblings or control subjects.

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That’s pretty interesting. I wonder why ? and if I gave up vaping would it be the same?

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We learned in pharmacology that smoking causes the release of dopamine…dopamine=worse symptoms for psychosis. Other reasons I could think of is nicotine is both a stimulant (triggers release of adrenaline first-adrenaline gives you a rush but isn’t the best chemical for helping you think clearly) and then a depressant (any kind of thing that depresses the CNS is going to make your cognitive function a bit worse).

Oddly my worst psychotic break came 3 years after quitting.

@roxanna this is the thread. Might be worth a read.

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Very interesting! I wouldn’t say I had cognitive improvement when I gave up but I did feel pretty good!