Effects of smoking and smoking abstinence on spatial vision in chronic heavy smokers

Abstract

Cigarette smoke is a complex chemical mixture, involving health-damaging components such as carbon monoxide, ammonia, pyridine, toluene and nicotine. While cognitive functions have been well documented in heavy smokers, spatial vision has been less characterized. In the article, we investigated smoking effects through contrast sensitivity function (CSF), a rigorous procedure that measures the spatial vision. Data were recorded from 48 participants, a group of non-smokers (n = 16), a group of chronic and heavy cigarette smokers (n = 16) and deprived smokers (n = 16); age range 20–45 years. Sinewave gratings with spatial frequencies ranging from 0.25 to 20 cycles per degree were used. All subjects were free from any neurological disorder, identifiable ocular disease and had normal acuity. No abnormalities were detected in the fundoscopic examination and in the optical coherence tomography exam. Contrary to expectations, performance on CSF differed between groups. Both smokers and deprived smokers presented a loss of contrast sensitivity compared to non-smokers. Post-hoc analyses suggest that deprived smokers were less sensitive at all spatial frequencies. These results suggest that not only chronic exposure to cigarette compounds but also withdrawal from nicotine affected spatial vision. This highlights the importance of understanding diffuse effects of smoking compounds on visual spatial processing.

Healthy Aging Impairs Photon Absorption Efficiency of Cones

“…These effects could be due to age or some other confounding factor differing between the two groups such as education, sex, smoking, cognitive impairments, and depression, which can affect contrast sensitivity. [35][36][37] Partial correlations between each dependent variable and age were evaluated while controlling for the effects of sex (male or female), smoking (yes or no), education (score from 0 to 5), cognitive impairments (score of MMSE), and depression (score of GHQ). The aging effects on photon noise, neural noise, and calculation efficiency all remained significant after controlling for these factors (r ¼ 0.38, P < 0.05; r ¼ 0.36, P < 0.05; r ¼ À0.62, P < 0.001, respectively), which shows that the observed aging effects cannot be explained by these factors (sex, smoking, education, cognitive impairments, and depression).…”

Combined influence of illness duration and medication type on visual sensitivity in schizophrenia

“…12 The session ended after 12 contrast reversals occurred. Higher contrast sensitivity values indicated that the participant had higher sensitivity (for procedural details, see Fernandes et al 1,4,11,13 ).…”

Tobacco Use Decreases Visual Sensitivity in Schizophrenia

“…Stimuli for the CSF were linear and vertically oriented and had sine wave gratings with spatial frequencies of 0.2, 0.6, 1.0, 2.0, 5.0, 10.0, and 20.0 cycles per degree (cpd). The stimuli consisted of equiluminant gratings with dimensions of 5 degrees of visual angle, which were presented on the monitor at 2.5° spatial offset from the central cross-shaped fixation point (for stimulus details, see dos Santos et al, 2013 ; Fernandes et al, 2017a ).…”

“…Likewise, heavy tobacco users without neuropsychiatric disorders, regardless of gender or age, also present spatiotemporal impairments ( Kunchulia et al, 2014 ; Fernandes et al, 2017a ). One may argue that this would occur in heavy tobacco users with SCZ.…”