He and his colleagues used data from close to 290,000 respondents, nearly all of which are smokers, to draw their conclusion that people with psychosis tend to smoke because cigarettes had caused their mental illness, apart from other factors such as genetics and environment.
Advertisement
King’s College Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Sir Robin Murray elucidated that excess dopamine is the most fitting biological explanation for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia.
While there does seem to be a link between cigarette smoking at a young age leading to schizophrenia later in life, the authors of the study caution that longer-term studies clearly establishing this link need to be done.
They also found that people with a first episode of psychosis were three times more likely to be smokers than those in the control groups.
It has long been hypothesized that higher smoking rates among psychosis sufferers could be explained by people seeking relief from boredom or distress, or selfmedicating against the symptoms or side-effects of antipsychotic medication.
London: Warning for Smokers!
In a landmark study published today, British researchers highlight statistical trends which suggest cigarettes can increase the chance of someone being diagnosed with psychosis. The recent research, however, identified that daily smoking along with genetic and environmental influences can also trigger mental illnesses, Irish Examiner reported.
While most smokers do not develop schizophrenia, the researchers believe it is increasing the risk, and the overall incidence of the condition is one in every 100 people normally, which may be increased to two per 100 by smoking.
However, it may be too early to take the finding too seriously at present as the researchers said that some of the studies they undertook did not take into account other factors. It seems that psychotic patients have the tendency to consume tobacco unlike the participants who did not experience any mental illness. They did speculate that it might have something to do with dopamine, the chemical which deals with emotion in the brain. But there is much debate about whether this is causal or whether there may be shared genes which predispose people to both cannabis use and schizophrenia. The findings need further investigation, the researchers said.
Advertisement
However, researchers argue that if this was the case, then there would have been evidence that rates of smoking would have increased only after an individual had developed psychosis. “The fact is that it is very hard to prove causation without a randomized trial, but there are plenty of good reasons already for targeting public health measures very energetically at the mentally ill”, he said.
