Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Smokescreen about the origins of psychosis

I said in a previous post that it was illogical to interpret an association between cigarette smoking and psychosis as causal, but this hasn't stopped Gage & Munafo in correspondence in Lancet Psychiatry trying. This publication was rushed through online first, presumably because the journal thinks it is potentially important. It follows a comment in the same journal by Fergusson et al published this month

As the correspondence authors say, "Of course, these data alone are not definitive". To reiterate, as they also said in a previous Lancet Psychiatry comment, "Although evidence of a causal effect of cigarette smoking on schizophrenia risk is consistent, it is certainly not definitive".

Please tell me why cigarette smoking can't be a proxy measure for poor premorbid adjustment associated with psychosis! Are people so blind to the psychosocial origins of psychosis that we have to be led down such aberrant research alleys? There seems to be a more fundamental need for revising our understanding of the psychosocial origins of psychosis than speculating wrongly about whether cigarette smoking causes psychosis.

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