title: Effects of smoking history on selective attention in schizophrenia.
abstract: Smoking prevalence is highly elevated in schizophrenia compared to the general population and to other psychiatric populations. Evidence suggests that smoking may lead to improvements of schizophrenia-associated attention deficits; however, large-scale studies on this important issue are scarce. We examined whether sustained, selective, and executive attention processes are differentially modulated by long-term nicotine consumption in 104 schizophrenia patients and 104 carefully matched healthy controls. A significant interaction of 'smoking status' × 'diagnostic group' was obtained for the domain of selective attention. Smoking was significantly associated with a detrimental conflict effect in controls, while the opposite effect was revealed for schizophrenia patients. Likewise, a positive correlation between a cumulative measure of nicotine consumption and conflict effect in controls and a negative correlation in patients were found. These results provide evidence for specific directional effects of smoking on conflict processing that critically dissociate with diagnosis. The data supports the self-medication hypothesis of smoking in schizophrenia and suggests selective attention as a specific cognitive domain targeted by nicotine consumption. A potential mechanistic model explaining these findings is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biopsychology, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Constanze
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dettling
authors.forename: Onur
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Güntürkün
authors.forename: Thi Minh Tam
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Ta
authors.forename: Andres H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Neuhaus
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000150:complications*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012907:Smoking / Q000523:psychology*