Nicotine Effects on Mismatch Negativity in Nonsmoking Schizophrenic Patients

Abstract

Background: The goal of the present study is to identify the effect of nicotine on auditory automatic processing, as reflected by mismatch negativity (MMN), in nonsmoking schizophrenic patients. Methods: Ten nonsmoking schizophrenic patients and 10 healthy volunteers underwent a reference session and 2 test sessions. The test sessions involved administration of a placebo patch and a nicotine skin patch, which were counterbalanced. Nicotine was administered transdermally under controlled dosage. Results: Nicotine administration shortened the MMN latencies (at Fz on nicotine/placebo: 134.8 ± 5.7/157.6 ± 6.4 ms) in healthy volunteers. In contrast, there were no significant differences in MMN latencies in schizophrenic patients (169.6 ± 5.7/165.0 ± 6.4 ms). Conclusion: Nicotine activates and accelerates preattentive and automatic processing in healthy controls, whereas there were no such effects observed in nonsmoking patients. The impaired MMN response to nicotine administration in nonsmoking schizophrenic patients may be attributed to low nicotinic receptor function, implicated in dysregulation of the glutamatergic system.

An acute dose, randomized trial of the effects of CDP-Choline on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in healthy volunteers stratified by deviance detection level

“…Most frequently investigated in healthy participants with frequency deviants, nicotinic stimulation has resulted in negative (Knott et al 2006, diminishing (Knott et al 2009) and enhancing effects on MMN amplitude (Dunbar et al 2007), with the latter positive outcome also being shown with pattern (Baldeweg et al 2006), temporal (Martin et al 2009) and visual deviants . Such response variability is also seen in the relatively few studies in SZ, with nicotine not affecting frequency deviant MMN (Dulude et al 2010;Inami et al 2007), shortening latency of intensity-deviant MMN ) and in our work, "normalizing" durationdeviant MMN by increasing the diminished MMN in patients to a level comparable to that seen in healthy volunteers (Dulude et al 2010).…”

Mismatch negativity (MMN) reduction in schizophrenia—Impaired prediction-error generation, estimation or salience?

“…In fact, Baldeweg et al demonstrated the major effect of nicotine to be enhanced adjustment to a new repetitious rule. Interestingly, not only do patients show reduced sensitivity to increasing repetition of a new rule , they also failed to show the nicotineinduced enhancement of MMN observed in the control group (Inami et al, 2007, although a very small sample size of n = 10). Nicotine is not a selective acetylcholine agonist so its affect on MMN could also occur via other means (e.g., dopaminergic, serotonergic, and cannabinoid (Herman and Sofuoglu, 2010;Wooters et al, 2009)).…”

“…Via this mechanism, acetylcholine could potentially improve the accuracy of perceptual inference by enhancing the integration of current input into the model. Several studies support the augmentation of MMN (either a larger or faster elicitation) following stimulation of acetylcholine via nicotine Inami et al, 2005Inami et al, , 2007. In fact, Baldeweg et al demonstrated the major effect of nicotine to be enhanced adjustment to a new repetitious rule.…”

Delayed preattentional functioning in early psychosis patients with cannabis use

“…Similarly, results remained unchanged when polydrug users were removed and analyses repeated, except for an additional significant difference between psychosis groups emerging for MMN latency. While users often mix tobacco with cannabis, nicotine does not appear to affect MMN in the psychosis population (Inami et al 2007), and as such, we did not assess tobacco use in our participants. Given recent evidence that nicotine may potentially interact with cannabis use in modulating MMN (Roser et al 2010), this could be considered a limitation of our study.…”