Lighthouse News Daily: Smoking Increases Risk of Psychosis Diagnose

Kings College, London researchers conducted a deep analysis of at least sixty one studies with a comprising information of 2,73,000 non smokers and 15,000 smokers.

The study revealed that those who smoked daily became psychotic in just around a year compared to those who didn’t smoke.

But the results did suggest that smoking “should be taken seriously as a possible risk factor for developing psychosis and not dismissed simply as a outcome of the illness”, they wrote. King’s College professor Sir Robin Murray noted that the belief that nicotine exposure increases the release of dopamine could “cause psychosis to develop” in individuals, further corroborating the researchers’ belief that the link between smoking and mental illness may be causal. This is not the first study to look at this link, as smoking has long been associated with mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

Smoking could play a direct role in the development of schizophrenia and needs to be investigated, researchers say. They discovered that, in comparison to the general population, schizophrenic patients looking for treatment were three times more likely to be smokers of cigarettes.

It is known that people with psychotic mental illness are more prone to take up smoking as a medium to get relief from distress and other psychological problems.

Funding for this research was provided by the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and King’s College London. This is because the nicotine in tobacco alters the levels of dopamine in the brain, which has been shown in previous research to be related to psychosis. Here we found that smokers were twice as likely to develop psychosis as non-smokers.

He added, however, that tobacco was only one of many factors, including certain genetic, diet, lifestyle and other influences, raising a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia.

However, the troubling factor with these hypotheses is that smoking rates exist before psychosis is developed and they do not increase significantly after people are diagnosed. The findings need further investigation, the researchers said. However, the latest research indicates that smoking cigarettes may actually increase the risk of developing psychosis in the first place. They did speculate that it might have something to do with dopamine, the chemical which deals with emotion in the brain.

“The fact is that it is very hard to prove causation without a randomised trial, but there are plenty of good reasons already for targeting public health measures very energetically at the mentally ill”.