Effects of nicotine on social cognition, social competence and self-reported stress in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

A 2 × 2-factorial design (drug × group) was used to investigate the effects of nicotine versus placebo in smoking schizophrenia patients and healthy controls after 24 h of abstinence from smoking.

Why It Was Studied

However, the effects of nicotine on social cognition and subjective stress responses in schizophrenia are largely unexplored.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Participants performed a facial affect recognition task and a semi-standardized role-play task, after which social competence and self-reported stress during social interaction were assessed.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

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.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Analysis of Variance, Cognition Disorders, Cotinine, Neuropsychological Tests, Nicotine, Nicotinic Agonists and Schizophrenia.

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 2013 (European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience), a journal based in Germany.

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