Smoking Away Schizophrenia?: Scientific American - 0 views
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Sue Frantz on 15 Sep 08"Schizophrenia is famous for its symptoms of hallucinations and delusions, but sufferers also face debilitating cognitive impairment-and standard treatments with antipsychotic medications do little to compensate for intellectual loss. Seeking improved mental clarity, many patients turn to a seemingly mundane source: cigarettes. The extraordinarily high incidence of smoking in individuals with schizophrenia-about 85 percent of patients smoke compared with some 20 percent of the general population-has spurred researchers to investigate the therapeutic effects of nicotine in the diseased brain."