Schizophrenia
While it is not yet possible to know precisely how well a7 nAChRs are activated by smoked nicotine, one can reasonably hypothesize that the patients’ higher dose of nicotine activates alpha7 nAChRs (Adler et al., 1993; Papke and Thinschmidt, 1998; Royal College of Physicians, 2007) PubMed:21482353
Yet some of the other genes identified, such as NRG1, are involved in the assembly of alpha7 nAChRs, further supporting a potential link between alpha7 nAChRs and schizophrenia (Mathew et al., 2007) PubMed:21482353
Polymorphisms in the alpha7 5' promoter and in a nearby partial duplication of the gene, FAM7A, are associated with both schizophrenia and the defect in inhibition (Leonard et al., 2002) PubMed:21482353
Polymorphisms in the alpha7 5' promoter and in a nearby partial duplication of the gene, FAM7A, are associated with both schizophrenia and the defect in inhibition (Leonard et al., 2002) PubMed:21482353
Clinical ratings of their negative symptoms, particularly anhedonia (absence of a sense of pleasure) and alogia (poverty of content in their speech), also improve during treatment PubMed:21482353
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If you find BEL Commons useful in your work, please consider citing: Hoyt, C. T., Domingo-Fernández, D., & Hofmann-Apitius, M. (2018). BEL Commons: an environment for exploration and analysis of networks encoded in Biological Expression Language. Database, 2018(3), 1–11.