Maltese researcher casts doubts on nicotine’s healing properties

This implies that nicotine may be of limited value in the treatment of Alzheimer Disease and other age-related neurodegenerative conditions which mostly affect the elderly.

According to a number of international studies nicotine, the principal psychoactive component of tobacco smoke has been found to elicit improvements in cognitive function.

These effects are thought to be related to the stimulation of neurotransmitter systems within areas of the brain that are important for cognitive processing.

As a result, drugs containing nicotine are being studied for their efficacy in the treatment of impaired cognitive functions experienced by patients with conditions such as Alzheimer Disease.

Scerri's study was based on the administration of nicotine to, twenty-four young (six to eight weeks) and eighteen-old-month rats. The rats were trained in an open field Morris water-maze. Rats were trained for four days to find an escape platform hidden below the surface of the water. The study showed that rats administrated with low doses of nicotine performed better than the control group. But data also suggests that learning in the water maze task was impaired by higher doses of nicotine.

Studies on hippocampal tissues  (a brain component located in the temporal lobe associated with memory) taken from the rats showed that the effect of nicotine on the release of a protein associated with Alzheimer disease was not observed in hippocampal tissue taken from aged animals.

Charles Scerri is a scientist at the University's Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Department.

In a previous study also involving the administration of nicotine to rats, the scientist found that people who smoke two or more packets of cigarettes a day are destroying cells in their brain. The study was published in the latest edition of the Malta Medical Journal.