Neuronal effects of nicotine during auditory selective attention in schizophrenia.

What Was Tested

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

To test this hypothesis, the present study examined response in these regions in a cohort of nonsmoking patients and healthy control subjects using an auditory selective attention task with environmental noise distractors during placebo and nicotine administration.

Why It Was Studied

The researchers hypothesized that nicotine would modulate attention-associated neuronal response in schizophrenia patients in the ventral parietal cortex (VPC), hippocampus, and anterior cingulate based on previous findings in control subjects.

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

The design is described as randomized, single-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover.

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.

In this single-blind Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) study one party knew the assignments and the other did not.

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

Each person switched between Therapeutic nicotine (patch, non-peptide) and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Acoustic Stimulation, Analysis of Variance, Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity, Brain, Brain Mapping, Nicotine and Nicotinic Agonists.

The authors tagged it with the keywords fMRI, hippocampus, schizophrenia and ventral parietal cortex.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The publication is from 2016 (Human brain mapping), a journal based in United States.

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