The effect of nicotine on different paradigns of attentional and oculomotor functions in Schizophrenia patients and normal controls /

Schizophrenic patients have a high prevalence of smoking. It has been postulated that this may be related to the positive effect of nicotine on cognition. We evaluated the effect of nicotine on attention and eye movements, domains in which schizophrenic patients have robust deficits. Patients (n = 19) who met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia and Controls (n = 15) were given a Nicoderm 14 mg patch in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover design, and performance on various attention tasks (Continuous Performance Task (CPT), Stroop, Treisman, Dixon-Lupien), and oculomotor tasks (fixation, smooth pursuit, saccades and antisaccade) was assessed. Nicotine significantly improved attention (CPT hit rate) in patients (p < 0.02) and not in controls. Nicotine increased pursuit gain (p < 0.01) and decreased antisaccade errors (p < 0.01) in patients and controls equally. The magnitude of the improvement on eye movement and attention tasks did not correlate with plasma nicotine concentration (measured by RIA). We conclude that nicotinic mechanisms modulate attention and oculomotor functions and that the effect of nicotine on pursuit may be mediated by attention