Project Summary

Michael Davidson, M.D. (Distinguished Investigator 2002) of Chaim Sheba Medical Center, will seek to ascertain if, before onset of illness, future schizophrenia patients smoked at rates and amounts higher than those of the future patients with other psychiatric disorders, and of the general population, as it has been repeatedly documented to occur after the onset of illness.  Dr. Davidson's study will take advantage of a naturalistic, historical-prospective design, to verify if the increased prevalence of smoking is present before the manifestation, diagnosis and the treatment of schizophrenia.  The study will link two registries-an entire population of 18 year-olds inducted to serve in the Israeli army, who have undergone an extensive cognitive, psychosocial and psychiatric assessment and the Israeli National Psychiatric Hospitalization Case Registry, which is a complete listing of all psychiatric hospitalizations in the country and their respective discharge diagnoses.  This study will enable Dr. Davidson to determine patterns of smoking among adolescents who are later hospitalized with schizophrenia, and to compare them with adolescents who are later hospitalized with other diagnoses, adolescents with psychiatric diagnoses at the time of induction, and to healthy adolescents.  Finding that smoking is increased specifically in future schizophrenia patients before the illness manifests and is diagnosed and treated, would bring tentative (but not irrefutable) support to the intrinsic, illness related hypothesis.  Finding an enhanced rate of smoking only in schizophrenia patients would clearly speak to a biologically-related enhanced vulnerability to smoking in schizophrenia.  The results of this study might indicate the need for more intense research on the nicotinic system in schizophrenia.

Program Area: SCHIZOPHRENIA/PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS

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