Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Potential Nicotine Treatment

Surprising twist (Los Angeles Times)

"Separated from cigarettes, molecularly tweaked and carefully administered, nicotine holds promise as a powerful treatment for a variety of illnesses, from Alzheimer's disease to depression to schizophrenia, many scientists now believe.

"This is tobacco biology that has been taken out of Big Tobacco and put into health research," says Dr. William Sandborn, a nicotine researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.What began more than a decade ago as a smattering of small studies has become a major research effort involving the federal government, the tobacco industry, a half-dozen pharmaceutical companies and dozens of private researchers. Some experts predict that the first nicotine-based medicine may reach the market in a few years."

Researchers have suspected that people with schizophrenia are "self-medicating" by smoking, that is, they are attempting to minimize their symptoms by smoking. New research is suggesting biological means that would explain how this might be the case.

For those with schizophrenia it may help with cognitive deficits such as a lack of concentration. In "Surviving Schizophrenia" it's noted that between 80 and 90 percent of those who have schizophrenia smoke. I've also seen numbers that suggest up to 50% of all cigarettes are smoked by the mentally ill. It would be a plus to remove the need for cigarettes with all their attendant hazards and replace it with a far safer nicotine based drug.