Nicotinic receptor desensitization and sensory gating deficits in schizophrenia.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at the intervention named in the title.

To examine this possibility, central cholinergic neuronal activity was diminished by allowing schizophrenic patients to sleep briefly, after which they experienced a transient period of normal P50 gating, consistent with receptor resensitization during the absence of cholinergic stimulation.

Why It Was Studied

Nicotinic receptor dysfunction is a possible mechanism of the abnormal sensory gating observed in schizophrenia with the P50 auditory event-related potential.

A critical test of the mechanism is whether this resensitization is blocked by concurrent administration of nicotine, which would provide continuous receptor stimulation.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, both men and women.

Six schizophrenic patients repeated the sleep experiment during nicotine exposure from a dermal patch, in a double-blind, placebo-controlled design.

How the Study Was Run

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

The participants were allocated by chance, so the intervention group and the comparison group should start out alike.

As a double-blind study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the intervention group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

A critical test of the mechanism is whether this resensitization is blocked by concurrent administration of nicotine, which would provide continuous receptor stimulation.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acoustic Stimulation, Administration, Cutaneous, Electroencephalography, Evoked Potentials, Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Habituation, Psychophysiologic and Nicotine.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 2 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 1998 (Biological psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

More context: all human trials.