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The relationship between smoking and mental illness well establishedbut scientists have long wondered what causes it.
Now, using health data from more than 350,000 people, geneticists at Denmark’s Aarhus University have found significant evidence that cigarette smoking does indeed: lead Links to Mental Disorders — A Perennial Controversy Among Researchers Who Have Had Trouble Determining Smoking make Whether you are mentally ill or a smoker because they are mentally ill.
Researchers led by Doug Speed of Aarhus have used the huge UK Biobank, which holds genetic data for more than 500,000 people, to track the health outcomes of people who started smoking in their late teens. I have found that they are often not hospitalized for a reason. At least until I was in my 30s, I was in emotional distress.
On the surface, this is strong evidence for the hypothesis that smoking causes symptoms ranging from depression to bipolar disorder, not the other way around.
“The numbers say it all,” Speed said in the article. press release. “Smoking causes mental illness.”
But that’s not all, he warned.
Most smokers carry genetic markers known as ‘smoking-related genes’ that may determine who is more likely to smoke and who is more likely to develop mental illness in the future.
“People in our data set who carried the smoking-related gene but never smoked were less likely to develop a psychiatric disorder than those who carried the gene and smoked,” Speed said. explained. “It used to be a bit murky because genetic variants also seem to be associated with the risk of mental illness. But this study suggests that the risk of starting smoking is likely to cause the risk of developing mental illness.” Proved that it is increased by a “smoking-related gene”. ”
As Speed and colleagues wrote in a recent paper in a diary Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavia He pointed out that more research is still needed to understand exactly how this seeming correlation works.
“We still need to understand the biological mechanisms by which smoking induces psychiatric disorders,” Speed said in an Aarhus press release. “One theory is that nicotine blocks the absorption of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and we know that people with depression don’t produce enough serotonin.”
Another theory is that smoking causes inflammation in the brain, which in the long term can damage parts of the brain and cause various mental disorders.
“But like I said,” said the researcher vaguely, “we don’t know for sure yet.”
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