Nicotine and the hallucinating brain: effects on mismatch negativity (MMN) in schizophrenia.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), published as a randomized controlled trial.

The objective of this study was to examine MMN-indexed acoustic change detection in schizophrenia (SZ) following nicotine administration and elucidate its association with AVH.

Why It Was Studied

Elevated smoking rates have been noted in schizophrenia, and it has been hypothetically attributed to nicotine's ameliorating abnormal brain processes in this illness.

There is some preliminary evidence that nicotine may alter pre-attentive auditory change detection, as indexed by the EEG-derived mismatch negativity (MMN), but no previous study has examined what role auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) may have on these effects.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Some participants received a placebo instead of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide), giving a reference point.

What Was Measured

Electrical activity was recorded from 32 scalp electrodes; MMN amplitudes and latencies for each deviant were compared between treatments and were correlated with trait (PSYRATS) and state measures of AVH severity and Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) ratings.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acoustic Stimulation, Blood Pressure, Brain, Contingent Negative Variation, Cross-Sectional Studies, Electroencephalography and Hallucinations.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide).

The publication is from 2012 (Psychiatry research), a journal based in Ireland.

More context: the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) compound page, all human trials.