According to the researchers, the data show that smoking multiplies the risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“The numbers are very clear. Smoking is a cause of mental illness. Not the only cause, but it increases the chance of being hospitalized with a mental illness by 250 percent,’ says Professor Doug Speed of the Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics at Aarhus University.
Researchers disagreed on causality: Do we get depression or other mental illnesses because we smoke? Or do we smoke because we need to suppress latent mental illness?
But the new research confirms that smoking usually precedes the development of mental illness.
‘So smoking usually precedes mental illness. That starts much earlier. On average, people in the data set started smoking at age 17, while most of them were admitted with a mental illness at age 30,” says Doug Speed.
The researchers have no precise explanation for why smoking increases the risk of mental illness.
‘We have yet to find the biological mechanism by which smoking leads to mental illness. One theory is that nicotine inhibits the uptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin. And we know that people with depression don’t produce enough serotonin,” says Doug Speed.
When you smoke one cigarette, nicotine activates the production of serotonin in the brain. This can provide a relaxing effect.
However, if you continue to smoke, nicotine may have the opposite effect and start inhibiting serotonin production instead.
This can make you anxious, sad and unstable, the researchers said.
According to the Trimbos Institute, almost one in five Dutch people smoke.
2023-08-31 17:10:36
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