Until recently, most hypotheses evolved around the need to find relief from distress, boredom or side-effects of the medication in smoking.
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But after the study, researchers are of one mind that tobacco might actually be responsible.
The new meta-analysis, conducted by researchers at King’s College London in the United Kingdom, assessed evidence from 61 observational studies, which involved 15,000 tobacco users and 273,000 nonusers overall.
Smoking cigarettes is quite common amongst people who suffer from mental illness, especially those with schizophrenia, which is a severe disorder that is characterized by hallucinations and delusional thoughts.
According to King’s College Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Sir Robin Murray, the excess dopamine is the best biological explanation for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia.
The researchers said nicotine altered levels of the brain chemical dopamine, which has already been implicated in psychosis.
The study, published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry, showed that 57 percent of people with psychosis were smokers when they first experienced a psychotic episode.
Smoking could play a direct role in the development of schizophrenia and needs to be investigated, researchers say.
The team from King’s College in London discovered that smoking could triple people’s chances of developing psychosis.
This is no longer surprising as a small research has been furnished about whether smoking could really be a contributory factor for psychosis.
However, they acknowledge that despite finding an association between smoking and psychosis, the direction of causality is hard to determine.
The impact of smoking on physical health is very well documented, but new research suggests it could be just as damaging to mental health. Researchers also found that psychotic illnesses develop in individuals who smoke daily, a year earlier than those who do not smoke. Smoking can damage every part of our bodies even including our mental structure.
More studies are necessary to understand the relationship between smoking and psychosis. The findings could also be confounded by other factors such as socioeconomic group and more research will be needed to establish this.
The director of the Institute of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University, Professor Michael Owen, stated that the research team had created a “pretty strong case” that smoking may raise the risk of schizophrenia.
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But, there does seem to be a link between people who eventually develop psychosis and schizophrenia and the age at which they began smoking.
